Disney+ rolled out Verts this week — a swipeable vertical video feed embedded in the mobile app's navigation bar, initially stocked with clips and scenes from Disney's entertainment catalog. Users swipe, discover, add to their watchlist, or jump straight into playback. The feature launched on ESPN last August. Now it's on Disney+.
What matters here isn't the format. It's the function.
The Mobile Engagement Gap
Streaming apps have a major usage problem that kind of gets forgotten between the headlines. The average subscriber opens their app, scrolls tiles for a few minutes, picks something or doesn't, and leaves. That's a handful of sessions per week, most of them on a TV. Mobile — where 94% of users hold their phones vertically and ad engagement rates dwarf lean-back TV — has been an afterthought.
TikTok and YouTube Shorts didn't just introduce a format. They trained a generation to expect short, swipeable, algorithmically personalized video the moment they open an app. Disney's EVP of Product Management Erin Teague framed it plainly at CES:
“We’re obviously thinking about integrating vertical video in ways that are native to core user behaviors,” Teague said. “So, it won’t be a kind of a disjointed, random experience.”
Netflix is building the same thing. Co-CEO Greg Peters confirmed vertical video will anchor a full mobile app redesign later this year, with plans to integrate video podcast clips into the feed. Tubi has Scenes. Peacock launched curated vertical playlists. The entire industry is converging on the same bet: if you can turn a weekly lean-back viewer into a daily mobile scroller, you fundamentally change the economics of the platform.
Why It's Worth Paying Attention
Vertical video feeds inside streaming apps create ad inventory that behaves like social but lives inside premium, brand-safe environments. Full-screen. Sound-on by default. Algorithmically targeted. Sitting inside first-party data ecosystems that Disney Advertising and Netflix's ad suite are already building out.
Disney's Brand Impact Metric — announced alongside Verts at CES — is designed to bridge brand and performance measurement across exactly these kinds of cross-format campaigns. That's not a coincidence. They're building the measurement infrastructure for inventory that doesn't exist at scale yet.
The pitch to advertisers goes like this: social-style engagement rates, streaming-grade brand safety, first-party targeting. If that inventory materializes at scale, it doesn't just compete with TikTok and YouTube Shorts. It reprices (or replaces) them.
What Comes Next
Disney says Verts will evolve to include creator content, new storytelling formats, and personalized experiences. Netflix is testing user-generated clips via its Moments feature. The question isn't whether vertical video becomes standard across streaming — it's how quickly it becomes monetizable, and who builds the ad stack to support it.
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