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Disney is raising an intriguing question: What if Quibi wasn’t wrong, but too early?
The spectacular failure of the short-form video venture during the height of the COVID pandemic served as a warning to media companies trying to cash in on skyrocketing screentimes and shrinking attention spans.
But the subsequent growth of TikTok and Instagram Reels has provided a different lesson: Short-form works as a vessel — it just has to be filled with the right stuff. Disney thinks it’s got it.
Disney+ has begun to roll out Verts, its new short-form video feed, to US mobile users. Verts will be housed inside the streaming platform, accessible through a new icon on the app’s navigation bar. Think of the feed like an interactive dispenser of trailers, or a buffet of snacks enticing people to stay on Disney+.
The venture is the latest in a tug-of-war between media companies and tech giants that feed off the public’s attention. Increasingly, the two are intermingling. But this is one way a Hollywood studio can control its own distribution channel and take back some of the attention commanded by the tech feeds.
As people swipe through a feed of clips, they can add shows and movies to their watchlist or hit play and start watching the real thing. At its most basic level, Verts is a clever way to solve the discovery problem of sifting through all the programming on Disney+ without the company having to rely on other media platforms to surface its content.
The House of Mouse is also borrowing the tech world’s feedback loop, allowing users to shape their own recommendation engine — giving the app signals about what they want to watch, which in turn steers the app to surface what it deems relevant and personalized for a particular user.
Giving a successful streaming platform a TikTok-style feed built on top of it will also boost watch time and engagement, helping to fortify its ad business and potentially lessen subscriber churn. The company’s initial experiments found that “Verts has driven additional engagement” to Disney+ and ESPN, the company wrote in a blog post.
But Verts can serve as an end in and of itself. While it can be YouTube Shorts, it can also be TikTok or Reels.
Disney’s new partnership with OpenAI showed that the children’s programmer isn’t averse to meeting people where they are — whether that’s the AI industry’s slopification of media or the brain rot that animates endless vertical feeds. The medium itself matters less than its use as a mechanism for delivering more Disney content and keeping audiences affectionately glued to Iron Man, Elsa, and the Skywalkers.