Nobody wants this: Netflix and Disney+ eyeing vertical videos

Everywhere I look I see people, their heads bent over their phones, scrolling through one vertical video after another. They’re in coffee shops, on the subway, in my house, even right next to me in bed. Scroll, scroll, scroll. 

Now vertical videos are jumping out of the TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook apps and heading for the living room. YouTube Shorts on the big screen have been around for awhile, of course, but now the long-format video streamers are eyeing vertical videos, too. 

Earlier this month, Disney said it wants to roll out vertical videos on Disney+, and now Netflix says it’s also getting serious about “verts.” 

For its part, Disney says “everything’s on the table” as far as vertical videos go, and that it’s essentially game for anything that turns Disney+ into a “must-visit daily destination.” 

Netflix, meanwhile, is mulling vertical videos as part of a wider redesign of its mobile app interface, with Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters saying that vertical shorts could be the perfect avenue for “more clips based on new content types, like video podcasts.” 

Look, I get it. As much as I grouse about vertical videos, I’m not immune to their addictive pull. Put me in front of a TikTok feed and I’ll dive in like a flock of pigeons attacking a bagel. 

And, to be clear, I’m actually cool with the idea of “verts” on the Disney+ and Netflix mobile apps, whether we’re talking podcasts (a market that Netflix is jumping into) or teasers for current and upcoming TV shows and movies. 

Netflix has long tinkered with vertical teasers on its mobile app, and it’s a decent experience for finding something to stream—heck, it’s better than endlessly scrolling through rows of too-familiar shows on the Netflix TV app. 

What I don’t like is the thought of vertical shorts making their way onto the biggest screens in our homes. To me, there’s something uniquely mobile about shorts—they’re small, intimate, brief, instantly forgotten, and best consumed privately, like when you’re sneaking one Lays potato chip after another. Watching them on an 80-inch OLED just seems, well, wrong.

If the news of long-form streamers dabbling in verticals sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Quibi, the short-form, Jeffrey Katzenberg- and Meg Whitman-backed video enterprise that launched back in 2020 and imploded in just six months, torching roughly $1.7 billion of equity in the process.  

Quibi’s goal was to crank out dramatic vertical shorts that mobile viewers would pay for. But nobody wanted it, and while Roku later scooped up Quibi’s library (rebranding the shorts as “Roku Originals” in a landscape format), it quietly pulled the videos in 2023. 

Personally, I don’t think anyone wants big-screen vertical videos from Disney+, Netflix, HBO Max, or any of the other major long-form video streamers, either.

Or at the very least, I don’t want it.