Reed Hastings famously said Netflix's biggest competitor was sleep. We’ve already sacrificed sleep for the frictionless dopamine of the upward swipe.
Netflix realized that even their own marketing was already vertical. They are cutting their best scenes into Reels and YouTube Shorts just to get people to open the app.
In an attempt to reclaim the attention they’ve lost to the infinite scroll, Netflix announced a complete mobile app redesign built around a vertical video feed. If they didn't offer a "snackable" way to consume content, they would lose the "commuter" and "waiting room" audiences.
Today, their biggest competitor is the cracks in our attention, those five-minute gaps in our day where we instinctively reach for Instagram Reels.
The platform that was supposed to be the last holdout has finally joined the vertical revolution. The format war is over. This essay is about how all forms of content consumption are tilting toward vertical.
Everybody thought ‘vertical’ meant ‘short-form’. It was synonymous with disposable, the junk food of media; and horizontal meant ‘premium’ and ‘prestige’. Boy, were we wrong. Runtime and screen orientation have been decoupled.
As much as 90% of video consumption in India happens on mobile devices. For hundreds of millions of new users in emerging markets, smartphone is the primary or only screen. To these users, video is vertical by default. They are absorbing an entirely different consumption behavior. You don't fight the form factor anymore. You surrender to it.
Vertical solves the 'choice paralysis' that plagued older grid-based viewing platforms, where users would spend fifteen minutes scrolling through thumbnails before giving up entirely.
And so the era of vertical long-form has begun. Feature-length content in vertical format sounds ridiculous until you realize we're already watching 30-minute YouTube videos on phones held upright. We're already binging 60-episode micro-dramas designed for 9:16 screens. We're already comfortable watching horizontal content crammed into vertical frames. We are tolerating a compromised viewing experience just to watch on our phones.
The final step is someone producing a vertical movie and it working. When that happens, the same critics who dismissed TikTok as a fad will dismiss vertical cinema as absurd. And then, slowly, they'll tilt their phones.