The moment vertical became the new centre of gravity

By the time we reached the end of 2025, something that had been building for years finally tipped. Vertical video stopped being a social trend or an experiment in the marketing team. It became the default way that audiences discovered live moments, reacted to them and shared them.

What changed was not only how people held their phones. It was how publishers commissioned coverage, how sports and news teams structured matchdays and breaking news, and how platforms rewired their discovery engines around short, mobile-native video.

Looking ahead to 2026, it is clear that live production has entered a new phase. Horizontal broadcasts remain essential, but they are no longer the sole centre of gravity. Vertical, multi-format, platform-native output now sits alongside them as a primary requirement.

A new year, and a new default behaviour

In 2025, vertical video stopped being a niche mobile format and became a mainstream consumption pattern across almost every category of media.

eMarketer reported that 9 in 10 US consumers are open to watching TikTok style vertical clips on publisher sites, a figure that underlines just how comfortable audiences have become with scrolling through short-form video, even in environments that used to be article led.

On the platform side, YouTube confirmed that Shorts had reached around 200 billion daily views, cementing short-form vertical video as a central discovery surface within the wider YouTube ecosystem rather than a side project. TikTok continued to push a feed built almost entirely around full-screen vertical content, while Meta’s product and ad updates repeatedly described Reels as the fastest growing format across Instagram and Facebook.

Even companies that historically sat far from the creator or social space began to follow the same playbook. Netflix tested a TikTok-like vertical discovery feed inside its mobile app, using short, scrollable clips to pull viewers into longer shows. The New York Times announced a dedicated Watch tab built around short-form, vertical, scrollable news video inside its core app, a very public signal that one of the world’s most traditional publishers now sees vertical video as a front door into its journalism.

Taken together, these developments made one thing obvious. Vertical is no longer an edge case that live teams can treat as an afterthought. It is where audiences arrive first.

Publishers stopped experimenting and started pivoting

If there was one unmistakable shift in 2025, it was the way publishers moved from testing vertical formats to fully reorganising around them. As the earlier examples demonstrate, the story was consistent across the industry. Vertical video is no longer a campaign tactic or a side-channel experiment. It has become a structural priority.

This momentum was driven by audience behaviour that left little room for hesitation. Research from eMarketer showed that publisher vertical video consumption grew rapidly throughout the year, with audiences far more willing to engage with short-form, mobile-native clips than with traditional long-form or article-based content. The report emphasised that publishers were “switching to vertical video to keep up with digital consumption,” underscoring a decisive break from legacy workflows.

At the same time, editorial teams recognised that their biggest source of competition was no longer other publishers, but creators. A Digiday industry analysis noted that audiences increasingly expect news, culture and live moments to arrive in the same native format they encounter everywhere else: full-screen, swipeable, personality-led and vertical.

This repositioning was not cosmetic. It required deeper operational change. Many organisations began investing in vertical-native graphics, vertical safe framing during live events, and editorial formats built specifically for mobile storytelling. Jobs that once sat exclusively in “social” teams became integrated into core editorial, live production and newsroom workflows. Instead of repurposing content outward, publishers began planning vertical output at the commissioning stage.

In other words, 2025 was the year publishers accepted that their audiences behave differently now, and that competing in this environment means producing content that feels native to the feeds people actually consume. Vertical formats are no longer supplementary. They are the frontline.

The future of live production is no longer about one output

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The formats that defined 2025

It is tempting to talk about vertical video as a single format. What we saw in 2025 was more complex. Vertical became an ecosystem of live and near live experiences that orbit the primary event.

On the live side, many rights holders introduced vertical sidecar broadcasts. While the main match, show or conference continued in a horizontal feed for TV, OTT or YouTube, a parallel TikTok or Instagram Live feed offered a vertical view with its own cameras, graphics and sometimes its own hosts. These sidecar productions were designed for mobile: tighter framing, constant on screen prompts, and deliberate space left for comments and reactions.

Alongside this, creator style alternate streams grew quickly. Influencers, players and commentators hosted their own vertical watch-along shows, often in partnership with rights holders. These were not replacements for the main broadcast. They were companion experiences that reframed the event through a more intimate, personality driven lens.

Short-form vertical highlights became the dominant way that key moments travelled. Goals, big calls, backstage moments, reaction shots and celebrations were clipped and published within seconds. On TikTok and Reels, these clips did not sit in a tidy “highlights package” but in an endless scroll where they competed with creators, memes and trends.

TikTok’s own What’s Next 2025 report describes how brands and publishers increasingly leaned into live, creator led and community led formats on the platform, including LIVE events designed around vertical, interactive storytelling rather than simple rebroadcasts of horizontal feeds. Meta’s guidance and third party analysis throughout 2025 repeatedly highlighted that Instagram Reels are now the platform’s fastest growing feature, delivering higher reach and engagement than other post types.

Across all of these formats, the pattern was clear. The more the production was conceived for vertical from the beginning, the better it performed.

Vertical became a live production challenge, not a social challenge

Vertical content wasn’t designed into most live workflows. It was extracted afterwards. That approach made sense when vertical was optional. In 2025, it became clear that vertical wasn’t optional anymore. It had become fundamental to how live moments travelled, were discovered and were discussed.

This change exposed a structural flaw in the way many teams were still operating. Live broadcasts were produced in horizontal, then clipped, reframed or cropped for TikTok, Reels or Shorts long after the moment had passed. That workflow simply couldn’t keep pace with how fast vertical content now moves.

TikTok’s trend and best practice guidance reinforced this shift. The platform emphasises live experiences that prioritise immediacy, interactivity and vertical native clarity. It encourages visible hosts, structured segments and real time engagement tools such as Q&A, polls and stickers. None of this can be achieved convincingly when vertical output is just an after-the-fact crop of a horizontal feed.

YouTube’s expectations evolved in the same direction. Shorts have become an integral part of the live lifecycle rather than a secondary channel. Industry analysis and YouTube’s own earnings reports highlight that Shorts contribute a significant share of discovery across the platform, and that channels combining Shorts with long-form content see stronger growth than those relying on long-form alone. In practice, this means the transition from live broadcast to short-form vertical highlights must happen instantly and intentionally.

Meta continued to double down on short vertical video through Reels. Its product updates consistently describe Reels as the fastest-growing format across Instagram and Facebook, and the company has added new tools and analytics specifically designed to help creators and publishers optimise vertical clips. Again, this is not a format that rewards repurposed horizontal footage. It rewards content crafted for mobile-first viewing.

The implication for live producers is clear. If TikTok expects vertical-native storytelling, YouTube expects Shorts as part of the live lifecycle and Meta fuels discovery through Reels, then vertical cannot be something handled by a social team two hours after full time. It must be designed into the live environment itself.

That is why vertical has become a live production challenge. To keep pace with platform expectations and audience behaviour, producers now need to generate multiple aspect ratios and narrative cuts at source, in real time, from the same event. The workflow must support vertical storytelling during the broadcast, not after it.

The quiet crisis: duplication is killing teams

None of this has been driven by producers asking for more complexity. It has been driven by audiences and platforms demanding more surfaces.

In practice, many teams found that a single event could easily generate a dozen different outputs: a primary horizontal broadcast, a vertical live feed, short-form vertical highlights for TikTok and Reels, horizontal highlights for YouTube, instant clips for X, sponsorship recaps, partner versions, OTT replays, FAST ready segments and sometimes a corporate cut for LinkedIn.

With traditional, hardware bound workflows, each of these outputs often implied its own mini production: separate equipment, separate operators, separate delivery chains and separate approval steps. That translated into duplicated effort, bottlenecks between teams and a constant sense of being a step behind the audience.

The result in 2025 was a growing gap between organisations that tried to scale these demands manually and those that began to rethink their workflows from the ground up.

The response: one production, many formats

The most significant structural shift in 2025 was the growing adoption of unified, cloud native production workflows designed for multi output from day one.

Instead of treating each destination as its own production, more teams began to adopt a single pipeline into which they ingest live sources once and out of which they generate multiple outputs in parallel. Within that environment, operators can produce a broadcast grade horizontal feed for YouTube and OTT, a vertical native feed for TikTok and Instagram, real time highlights for X and Meta, and archive ready versions for OTT libraries and FAST schedules, all while maintaining a consistent graphic identity.

This approach dovetails with the evolution of OTT and FAST. Analysts at Omdia and other research firms continue to report strong growth in FAST channel revenues and viewing across markets, driven by platform investments from players such as Roku, Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV and others. FAST relies on a steady supply of live, replay and shoulder programming, while OTT apps rely on high reliability and high quality live streams. A unified workflow allows the same live moment to power these premium environments as well as short-form, vertical and social outputs.

Cloud native production does not automatically solve every operational challenge. It does, however, make it realistic for a small or mid sized team to produce many outputs without multiplying hardware, headcount or location based control rooms. It brings digital and broadcast operations into the same environment, rather than treating them as separate universes.

What 2025 means for 2026

Looking back on 2025, a few lessons stand out.

First, vertical is now a core output, not a derivative format. The audience reaches live moments through vertical feeds and short clips as often as, and sometimes more often than, through traditional broadcasts.

Second, publishers and platforms have committed to this model. eMarketer’s data on vertical video adoption, TikTok’s trends reports, Meta’s focus on Reels and YouTube’s public Shorts milestones all point to the same conclusion.

Third, duplication is no longer sustainable. Running multiple parallel mini productions for every platform leads to burnout and inconsistency rather than reach.

Finally, the workflows that win are the ones that allow teams to produce once and publish everywhere. In other words, the teams that thrive are those that think of their live operation as an ecosystem rather than a single output.

As we move through 2026, the opportunity is to treat these lessons not as pressure, but as a framework for better production. Vertical native formats force clarity about what matters in a moment. Multi output workflows encourage collaboration between broadcast and digital teams. Cloud based tools remove some of the physical constraints that used to limit ambition.

The challenge is real, but so is the upside. A single live event can now become a broadcast, a vertical show, a stream of short clips, a FAST schedule and a library of evergreen content, all without losing its identity.

To make the most of that opportunity, production teams need more than inspiration. They need a clear, practical way to build these workflows into their day to day operations. That is why we have built a multi platform playbook for live producers, designed to help experienced teams deliver high impact content across every channel, without increasing headcount or adding more hardware.

Live production is no longer only about putting pictures on one screen. It is about orchestrating a presence across every surface where your audience spends its time, whether that is a TV, a phone in portrait, or a scrollable feed of moments that move at the speed of culture.

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