Even traditional video-on-demand services are no longer safe, it seems: Netflix vertical video is coming later this year.
The company started testing the idea more than six months ago, and one of its co-CEOs has now confirmed that the move is going ahead …
Vertical Video Syndrome
I’ve never attempted to hide my own views on this particular affliction. Yes, I fully understand that a great deal of video viewing now takes place on phones. Yes, I appreciate that the default orientation of phones is vertical.
However, iPhones and other sophisticated models incorporate an advanced feature in which we are able to use our supplied arms to manually rotate the device 90 degrees in order to use it in landscape mode.
Netflix vertical video is coming
TechCrunch reported the bad news from the company’s latest earnings call.
Set to launch later in 2026, Netflix’s redesigned mobile app is intended to “better serve the expansion of our business over the decade to come,” according to co-CEO Greg Peters […] At the center of the redesign is deeper integration of vertical video feeds, which the streaming giant has been experimenting with since May.
The experiments have so far been limited to short trailers from Netflix shows and movies, but Peters suggested that there may be worse to come.
“You can imagine us bringing more clips based on new content types, like video podcasts,” Peters remarked during the earnings call, further signaling that Netflix sees swipeable short-form clips as a powerful tool for capturing attention and increasing time spent in the app.
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