Open Paramount+ on an iPhone this summer and you’ll find something that has no business being in a prestige-TV app: an endlessly scrolling feed of full-screen vertical clips. Netflix has one. Prime Video has one. Both call theirs Clips — so does Paramount+. Disney built two of its own, one for ESPN and one for Disney+, and named them Verts. Even Spotify, a music service, ships a vertical-scrolling video feed now.
None of this is a coincidence, and none of it is really about TV. In a new column published Sunday, The Verge’s David Pierce traces how vertical video conquered every screen it touched — and why the streaming services that spent a decade positioning themselves as the opposite of social media are now cloning it as fast as they can.
The copy machine has been running since 2013
The lineage is short and brutal. Snapchat launched Stories in late 2013 and watched it become the app’s most popular feature within months. By August 2016 Instagram had copied it outright — then-CEO Kevin Systrom conceded Snapchat “deserve all the credit” — and Stories promptly spread to LinkedIn, Tinder, and seemingly every app with a login screen. New York magazine called the format war over as early as 2016, in a piece bluntly titled “Vertical Video Won.”
TikTok then fused the vertical format with permanence and an algorithmic For You page, and the rest of the industry spent the early 2020s in catch-up mode: Reels arrived in 2020, YouTube Shorts a year later, and Twitter’s Fleets launched and died within twelve months. Per Pierce’s reporting, Meta flipped its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all of its apps in 2024 — the moment, he argues, the race was officially won.
What makes the current phase different is who’s copying now. The first wave was social apps copying each other. The second wave is television copying social apps.
Inside the Clips clone wave
The clearest look inside the streamer playbook comes from Business Insider’s reporting on Paramount+, which launched its short-form vertical feed on iOS this spring under CEO David Ellison. The mechanics are unglamorous: the feed is stocked with repurposed snippets from shows like South Park and The Madison, and as one streaming employee admitted, “Right now, it’s just horizontal clips fitted into vert format.”
The internal goals are stated just as plainly. “We’re trying to drive visit frequency, keeping people engaged in the app longer,” a person familiar with the initiative told Business Insider. A January email from Paramount+ product and design head Dan Reich asked how to “jump-start efforts to get a million clips into our Short Form UX as quickly as possible.” Paramount leadership has even brainstormed opening the feed to user-generated content — which would make a subscription streamer function like YouTube or TikTok — though the company says UGC isn’t coming for now.
Swap the logos and the story repeats across the industry. A streaming service’s oldest problem is discovery: subscribers open the app, browse for eleven minutes, and close it without pressing play. A vertical feed deletes that decision entirely. You open the app and it is already playing something. If a South Park clip stops your thumb, maybe you watch the episode; if it doesn’t, the next clip is already loading. The feed doesn’t need you to choose — it only needs you to not leave.
The two numbers driving all of this
Follow the money and the clone wave stops looking like a fad. Pierce’s column collects the relevant figures: Meta said in 2025 that Reels had grown into roughly a $50 billion annual business across its apps, and YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025 — while noting that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos. Short-form video is no longer the loss-leader teaser for “real” content. It is, per watch hour, the better business.
That matters to streamers for a specific reason: after years of price hikes, nearly every major streaming service is betting its next phase of growth on advertising. And the ad units that brands are already comfortable producing — six- and fifteen-second vertical spots built for TikTok and Reels — make no sense inside a cinematic 16:9 drama. They make perfect sense inside a vertical clip feed. Building the feed isn’t just an engagement play; it’s building shelf space for the exact inventory advertisers already have on hand.
The audience math points the same way. In its April 2026 study of teen platform habits, Pew Research Center found that roughly nine-in-ten or more teens name entertainment as a reason they use TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat — with entertainment an especially strong motivator on TikTok, where about eight-in-ten users call it a major reason. For a generation that treats a scrolling feed as the default shape of entertainment, a wall of movie posters is friction. Streamers are not converting these viewers to appointment television; they are meeting them where their thumbs already are.
What actually changes for subscribers
In the near term, mostly the home screen. The feeds are additive today — Netflix’s and Paramount+’s clip rows sit alongside the normal catalog, not in place of it. The material is also, for now, recycled: trailers, scene cuts, and horizontal footage cropped into a phone-shaped frame, which is why early versions feel more like a marketing channel than a new medium. Disney’s Verts experiment is the one to watch here, because ESPN is a natural fit — sports already lives on highlight clips, and a vertical highlights feed inside the ESPN app competes directly with the TikTok accounts that currently repost those same plays without permission.
The longer arc is worth watching more skeptically. Pierce notes that Facebook is testing a version of its app that opens directly into a full-screen video feed — no friends, no timeline, just Reels. That is the end state these products drift toward, because every incentive (time spent, ad load, algorithmic control) pushes in the same direction. A streaming app that today uses clips to route you toward full episodes could tomorrow discover, as the social platforms did, that the feed itself monetizes better than the destination. Marketing data backs the drift: a recent HubSpot survey cited in the Verge piece found short-form video was both the most-used and most successful marketing format of 2025, and the one marketers planned to invest in most this year.
There is one genuine counter-current. Pierce points to early signs of fatigue — users agitating for friends-first feeds again, young people deliberately putting phones down, movie theaters having a strong year. But he lands on a sober conclusion: as long as attention is the business, vertical video wins, and it would take a cultural revolution to stop it.
For subscribers, the practical takeaway is simpler. The subscription you bought for prestige television is quietly acquiring a second personality — one built to be opened, scrolled, and interrupted by ads you’ve already seen on TikTok. Whether that makes your streaming service more useful or just noisier depends entirely on whether the clip feed stays a doorway to the catalog, or becomes the destination.
