As more major media and entertainment companies jump on the vertical video bandwagon and tech providers launch products to streamline its creation, analysts at LightShed Partners are pouring cold water over Hollywood’s approach to the format.
In a note to investors, LightShed analysts Richard Greenfield, Brandon Ross and Mark Kelley said, “We believe the strategy behind almost all of these products, including Netflix, is dead wrong and misses the far larger opportunity in mobile vertical video content.”
In recent days, Netflix launched a vertical video feed in its mobile app, joining Disney+ (Verts), ESPN (Verts), Peacock (Clips), Paramount+ (Clips), and CNN (Shorts). All are responding to the growing popularity of vertical video particularly among younger audiences.
At NAB Show earlier this month, AWS launched new AI-powered tools to automate vertical video creation creation of vertical video, with data showing Gen Z viewers consume 88% of the streaming content they watch on their phones, and that users are spending more time watching vertical video than content from Netflix, Disney+ or Prime Video on their phones.
While some companies like The New York Times and CNN have been creating compelling original vertical video content, “none of the major media companies are willing to take a small portion of their massive content budgets to attack original vertical programming for mobile devices,” the LightShed analysts said.
“While it is great to see so many media companies launching vertical content for mobile devices, creating clips of existing content is underwhelming at best,” they argued. “We doubt users spend meaningful time watching short clips of long-form content, and these feeds certainly do not make you want to come back regularly the way dedicated mobile entertainment apps do.”
“Only CNN is making its own original programming specifically formatted for vertical mobile viewing,” they noted. Worse, the analysts argued, some of the repurposed content for vertical video is badly done. “ESPN and Paramount+ are simply reformatting horizontal content into a vertical feed, and it looks awful, with text impossible to read,” they said.
Read the full post, along with examples of vertical video being produced, here.
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