Disney+ will add vertical video within its app this year after ESPN introduced Verts in the new ESPN App last summerVertical video is on the rise. At CES Last month, Walt Disney Co. made waves by announcing that it will add a vertical-video experience inside Disney+ as a way to boost mobile engagement and improve content discoverability across the streaming service.
The move follows ESPN's relaunch of its app late last summer, which introduced Verts: a swipeable, personalized vertical-video hub designed to modernize how fans consume highlights and short clips on mobile. Pro sports leagues have been leaning in the same direction: for example, the NBA has incorporated a vertical, social-style browsing experience within its own app in recent years. Such moves reinforce that the format is no longer just a social-platform play; it's becoming a core feature of owned-and-operated products.
One of the technology vendors in the marketplace helping broadcasters of all shapes and sizes meet the endless content demands of this ecosystem is Quickplay. SVG sat down with Quickplay co-founder and Chief Business Officer Paul Pastor to discuss why that migration matters. He breaks down the growing strategic value of vertical video inside first-party environments - from delivering topicality and velocity at scale to improving onboarding, personalization, and retention through richer viewer-behavior data - and explains how media organizations can operationalize these workflows without getting boxed into a fixed, quickly outdated AI stack.
Vertical short-form video has traditionally lived on social platforms. From your perspective, what do the moves by Disney, ESPN, and even the NBA to introduce vertical video inside their own apps signal about how premium broadcasters view this format?
It's a necessity. It's no longer watching from the sidelines. The big question for media companies now is how they participate in the new creator economy and how they build both capabilities and storytelling formats for those audiences.
What we see in the marketplace is that demand often starts with marketing teams. They want to participate on these platforms with far more topicality and velocity than they've ever had before but with the same small teams and shrinking budgets. At the same time, they're sitting on enormous libraries of valuable content.
Tools like Quickplay's AI Studio allow them to listen to social signals, identify what conversations are happening, query their content libraries, and surface clips that may be buried deep in the archive but suddenly become relevant. That content can be enriched with vertical-specific metadata and prepared for publishing in seconds or minutes rather than days.
We're also seeing strong demand around first-party experiences. People no longer want to download an app and immediately be blocked by a subscribe screen without understanding what content is behind it. Vertical short-form experiences can showcase what lives behind the paywall.
The real value is the data. We can see how long someone watches, what they interact with, what they share or save. That dramatically improves the cold-start problem and allows platforms to drive engagement as soon as someone subscribes.
Another area is using short-form as a new discovery layer - essentially, a new EPG - to surface library content that platforms are not constantly promoting as new releases. That content becomes critical for retention, personalization, and recommendation engines.
We also see growing interest in allowing audiences and creators to engage directly with a broadcaster's IP using AI moderation tools to ensure brand compliance, rather than having those conversations happen entirely off-platform.
From a sports perspective, we've seen real results. One client that opened its platform to influencers creating short-form content saw a 50% reduction in churn in the month after a season ended compared with prior years.
How are the goals for vertical video different when it lives inside a broadcaster's owned-and-operated platform versus being used primarily for social distribution?
We advise clients to treat this as a both-and strategy. You still need to be relevant on third-party platforms, but the opportunity in first-party environments is significant.
The return on investment is not just engagement. It's the data. That data is what ultimately enables a better ecosystem.
From our perspective as a technology provider, the ability to operationalize AI workflows end-to-end and continuously extend capabilities as new tools become available is what allows us to win the technical conversation after the strategic one.
For the teams doing the work - often with the same resources but far more distribution demands - how does this shift change day-to-day operations?
I'll give you an example from a client. When Bad Bunny appeared on Saturday Night Live, a social conversation quickly developed around a specific sketch. The first challenge is simply knowing that a conversation is happening. Our tools scrape and analyze social signals and translate those trends into queries against a client's content library.
In this case, it took the content owner about 10 hours to locate relevant archival content manually. Using our AI metadata models, it took less than a minute to identify the correct material. We had it verticalized and ready for publishing in under a minute. The content owner was unable to publish within 24 hours.
That's the difference: topicality and velocity.
We also apply AI moderation tools so that material that may be acceptable in long-form programming can be filtered or adjusted for short-form use. We handle music rights, entitlements, and platform-specific requirements as part of the workflow.
The result is moving from missing a social moment entir
