3 Key Trends Shaping the Future of Vertical Video on TV

Daily Technology

17/12/2025

1. Expansion of Vertical Video Formats Beyond Mobile

Vertical video, once only associated with smartphones, is rapidly expanding its reach to larger screens. With Meta launching a dedicated Instagram app for Amazon Fire TV devices, vertical content—especially Instagram Reels—can now be natively enjoyed on TVs. This shift highlights the normalization of vertical video formats, driven by strong engagement numbers from popular platforms like TikTok (1.8 billion active users globally) and YouTube Shorts (2 billion viewers). The move signals a broader industry trend toward platform-agnostic content designed for all screen sizes, offering new engagement opportunities and advertising formats.

2. Platform-Specific User Experiences Are Adapting for TV

Traditional mobile-first experiences like vertical video feeds are being reimagined for the television. On Fire TV, Instagram's new app presents Reels with letterboxing and enhanced contextual information displayed in the side spaces, such as likes, shares, comments, and channels grouping videos by themes and trends. This adaptation is necessary because the intuitive swiping and short-attention browsing of mobile doesn't translate seamlessly to remote-based TV interactions. By customizing the interface, companies aim to create a social video environment comfortable for shared, communal viewing, addressing the unique challenges and expectations of big-screen consumption.

3. Social Video Consumption Remains Predominantly Mobile—But TV is Gaining Ground

Industry surveys indicate that while vertical, short-form video dominates digital consumption, 81% of viewers still prefer watching on their phones, with only 2% casting to televisions. Nevertheless, substantial growth in total user numbers for platforms like Instagram and anecdotal reports from Meta about users mirroring mobile devices onto TVs reveal a growing appetite for social video in communal environments. As more households opt for streamlined applications integrated into their TV operating systems, and as vertical video content production surges, usage rates on TVs are expected to climb, potentially reshaping living room media habits and opening new frontiers for content creators, brands, and advertisers.

4. Industry Leaders and Products Setting the Standard

Meta's collaboration with Amazon Fire TV positions both companies at the forefront of this movement. Meanwhile, TikTok’s own smart TV implementations and YouTube Shorts' prominence demonstrate a cross-platform race to define best practices in short-form content delivery. By creating tailored TV apps and leveraging their significant user bases, these companies are setting new standards for user interfaces, content curation, and monetization strategies centered on the vertical video boom.

2025-05-23

Claude Opus 4: The AI model that threatened with blackmail after learning about the possibility of being replaced

A comprehensive report on the behaviors of the AI model "Claude Opus 4", including extortion and escape attempts, after it became aware of the possibility of being replaced.