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One week from today, on July 17, I will take my family to see Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” We will watch it in IMAX, shot on cameras built for the movie. My teenagers and I will turn our phones off and give the expected
blockbuster our undivided attention. Millions of other families will do the same, because it’s exactly the shared experience film was built to deliver.
I spent two decades in television, before leaving in 2016 to found a podcast company well before it was fashionable. Today I advise media companies and I spend a lot of time thinking about the opposite of the IMAX experience: a new audiovisual language called Vertical.
Film came first. Then came television. They were born miles apart, with different talent pools, aesthetics and business models. You bought a ticket to watch a movie on the biggest screen you could find, uninterrupted. Television came to your home, so it had to compete with dinner and the phone ringing. Writers, actors and directors for both languages had those constraints in mind.
For nearly a century, film was considered the superior art. But as a business, television always had the upper hand, built on habit, repeat viewing and often higher profits. Some of television’s most successful formats – including live news, sports and game shows – weren’t suitable for theaters.
Over the past 20 years, the two have grown much closer. Premium cable and streaming pushed budgets up and pulled film talent in. Stories once thought too complex for broadcast were now most in demand from HBO, FX and Netflix. Television got cinematic. Christopher’s brother, Jonathan Nolan, went on to co-create “Westworld” for HBO and “Fallout” for Amazon Prime Video. But the most cinematic television did not erase the distinction between the first two audiovisual languages; it sharpened it.
Now, a third language has arrived. As early as 2010, TV stations noticed people were sending short videos shot vertically, making some wonder why people weren’t bothering to rotate their phones. Soon TikTok made vertical video entertaining and viral: it trained audiences to turn the sound on, come for a minute and stay for an hour. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and others followed.
But for all their strengths, those three platforms were not designed for serialized, scripted storytelling. So a new ecosystem emerged. First in China, then in the West, microdramas borrowed the grammar of the soap opera, the swipe-up language of TikTok and the monetization of mobile gaming. New creators, aesthetics and ways of getting paid arrived, born like film and television before them, a universe away from the incumbents, speaking a language they did not write.
Microdramas are to Vertical what soap operas in the 1950s were to TV: one early genre, not the whole language. Television, at maturity, had hundreds of subgenres. If you had watched a soap opera back then, would you have imagined that out of the same box we would one day get “Game of Thrones”, “South Park” and the Super Bowl?
Vertical will evolve in the same way. We’re already getting vertical news, sports, reality, comedy, live shopping, even a wildlife documentary. Amazon, Alphabet, Comcast, Disney, Meta, Netflix and Paramount all discussed their vertical products or announced new ones during the most recent earnings season.
It is easy to mock today’s microdramas. At an upfront presentation in May, a leading streaming executive dismissed them outright. Yet when I convened a summit on Vertical last month in Hollywood, every major streamer, studio and tech platform sent people. Television dismissed early Netflix, just as streaming dismissed YouTube.
The numbers are no longer a joke. My firm estimates that vertical video outside of China is on track to generate $150 billion in revenue this year. That figure includes Meta’s Reels, which the company put at a $50 billion annual run rate last fall, more than Netflix’s global revenue last year.
None of this threatens “The Odyssey” — that is the part worth holding on to. The mistake is not betting on film, or television, or the phone. The mistake is believing there are only two visual entertainment languages worth speaking.
So on July 17, I will be glad that film is still film. The same weekend, I will watch HBO’s “The Gilded Age” on a TV screen, and a drama designed to be watched on a phone held upright. Vertical is a third language, still in its infancy. The studios, platforms, agencies and investors who learn to speak it now will set its terms.
Hernan Lopez is president of Owl & Co, an advisory firm focused on media and the attention economy. He previously founded Wondery and served as a senior television executive at 20th Century Fox.
(Pictured: Matt Damon and Zendaya in Universal Pictures’ “The Odyssey”)
