Here's an uncomfortable truth: The streaming wars that promised to liberate us from cable television's formulaic timewasting have devolved into something familiar and dispiriting. This week, Disney launched Verts, a new vertical video experience on Disney+ designed to help users discover content more quickly on mobile devices, with subscribers in the United States now able to access the feature through a new icon in the app's navigation bar.
Strip away the corporate language about "discovery" and "personalized feeds," and what has actually happened? Disney looked at TikTok, looked at Instagram Reels, looked at the billions of hours humans spend scrolling vertically on their phones, and decided to build that exact experience into its streaming service. The company is not positioning this as a minor convenience feature. Disney is looking to boost daily engagement with the addition, and the language of "daily destination" runs through every executive statement. They want you checking the app the way you check Twitter or TikTok.
Disney is not alone. Netflix launched a vertical feed last year that lets users scroll through clips from its original titles, and before that, Verts joined the beefed-up ESPN app when it launched last August. What we are watching is not innovation; it is capitulation. Streaming services built their initial brands around a seductive promise: a curated alternative to the mind-numbing infinite scroll of network television and social media. Now they are just building the infinite scroll themselves.
The mechanism is straightforward enough. Verts introduces a swipeable interface that lets viewers browse through scenes and moments from across the Disney+ catalog, with users able to instantly add titles to their Watchlist or jump directly into full playback. But the psychology underneath is harder to deny. In both early experiments on Disney+ as well as since launch on ESPN in August, Verts has driven additional engagement, much of which can be attributed to the new advanced algorithm that powers the recommendation engine for the experience to ensure that Verts feels uniquely relevant and personalized to each individual user.
Notice what they did not disclose. They did not say how much engagement increased. They did not break down whether this engagement translated to people watching more long-form content or simply spending more time swiping. Disney's own framing should raise questions. An "engagement" metric in social media and streaming contexts typically means one thing: time spent in the app. Engagement does not necessarily mean satisfaction, completion, or anything resembling traditional television viewing. It means stickiness. It means habit formation.
To their credit, Disney executives have been reasonably candid about the reasoning. Erin Teague, EVP of Product Management for Disney Entertainment and ESPN, said everything's on the table in terms of how vertical video is delivered on Disney+, which could be original short-form programming, repurposed social clips, refashioned scenes from longer-form episodic or feature titles or a combination, and that they're thinking about integrating vertical video in ways that are native to core user behaviors. In other words, they are adapting to mobile consumption patterns that already exist rather than trying to reshape them.
There is something to that argument. By introducing short-form video content, Disney+ and Netflix are targeting younger users who are accustomed to watching quick clips on their phones rather than long-form content like TV shows and movies. Generation Z genuinely does consume media differently. Fighting that reality is pointless. The question is whether streaming services should enable and entrench that behaviour or find ways to bridge it toward longer-form engagement.
What complicates the picture further is that this same vertical feed could theoretically serve a genuine discovery function. While Verts is starting as a way to showcase clips from content on Disney+, the company says it will eventually feature content from creators that reflects our fandoms, plus other storytelling formats, content types, and personalized experiences. There are real content creators—people making thoughtful commentary on Disney films, analysis of characters, fandom content—who could benefit from visibility on a platform with hundreds of millions of subscribers. If Disney follows through on broadening creator participation, this could represent genuine opportunity for independent voices.
But here is where the cynicism sets in. Disney is not building this primarily for creators or for the genuine benefit of content discovery. Disney is bringing a short-form, vertical video feed to Disney+ as the streamer looks to make the service a more frequent daily destination on mobile. The language is unambiguous. This is about habit formation. This is about winning the battle for attention against every other application on your phone. It is the same game that TikTok plays, the same game that Instagram plays, the same game that destroyed meaningful conversation on Facebook.
What makes this transition worth noting is not that it is happening—corporate convergence always happens—but that we are watching streaming services, which were supposed to represent an alternative to algorithmically-driven, engagement-obsessed media, adopt exactly those mechanisms wholesale. They spent a decade positioning themselves against the old television model. Now they are copying the new social media model with equal enthusiasm.
The real question consumers should ask is simple: what are you getting out of this? If you find yourself scrolling through Disney clips looking for what to watch next, and Verts actually saves you fifteen minutes of decision-making fatigue, that is a genuine benefit. But if you find yourself scrolling for twenty minutes and leaving empty-handed, or starting a clip and losing track of time, then you are participating in exactly the kind of engagement metric that benefits Disney's shareholders while diminishing your own experience. The system is designed to be maximally efficient at the former and maximally seductive about the latter.