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Despite Netflix’s big ‘Clips’ move, it’s still coming up short on mobile vertical content, critics say

The U.S. premium SVODs are leveraging nifty AI tech to chop up their existing library content and distribute it to their own apps in 9:16 format. While that’s a ‘baby step’ in the right direction, Richard Greenfield thinks they should put more skin in the mobile video game

While critics have taken aim at the micro-drama business model — poor production values, terrible treatment of workers and escalating content cost, just to name a few Quibis, er, quibbles — the so-called vertical drama business charges on.

TikTok, which took a usage hit after President Trump gifted it to a group of oligarchs, is back in expansion mode, averaging 90 million daily U.S. active users. Last week, TikTok launched its own vertical app, PineDrama.

And with AI tools’ “knowledge graphs” making it quick, easy and inexpensive for media and tech giants to chop up existing libraries and self-distribute clips in 9:16 format, Netflix last week became the latest big U.S. media company — following Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+ and others — to integrate “clips” into its app.

Penske’s showbiz trades aptly called it a “baby step.” Netflix Clips delivers vertical highlights of Netflix movies and shows to your phone, enticing users to watch the full-length programming in landscape.

In a paywalled note to investors, Lightshed Partners’ Richard Greenfield and his colleagues lauded the move as a step in the right direction, but said Netflix should put original vertical content on its app and gather more of its own data about Gen Z mobile-video consumption habits. But Netflix and its premium SVOD competitors aren’t going far enough, they said.