What is vertical video production? A definitive guide
Vertical video has gone from social experiment to the default way audiences watch live moments. Here’s what vertical video production actually means, and what it takes to do it properly at broadcast scale.
Search “what is vertical video production” and you’ll mostly find tutorials about cropping clips for social media. That’s fine for creators and marketers. It’s nowhere near the reality for broadcasters, sports leagues and rights holders trying to produce live vertical video at scale.
Because vertical isn’t a niche anymore. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Snapchat have fundamentally reshaped how audiences consume live content on mobile, while broadcasters and rights holders are increasingly designing workflows around vertical-first viewing behaviours. Fox Sports has stated that nearly 90% of its digital content is now consumed vertically, underlining just how quickly mobile viewing habits have shifted.
This guide explains what vertical video production is, how it’s actually made, and why producing it well for live is a very different job from reformatting a finished clip.
What is vertical video production?
Vertical video production is the process of creating video in a tall, portrait frame, most commonly a 9:16 aspect ratio at 1080 × 1920 pixels, designed to be watched full-screen on a phone. For broadcasters and rights holders, it means treating vertical as a deliberate output with its own framing, graphics and editorial decisions, rather than simply cropping the sides off a horizontal feed. Done properly, the vertical version is produced for the platform, not salvaged from the broadcast.
Why vertical video matters now
The shift is being driven by where attention has moved. TikTok, Instagram Reels and Stories and YouTube Shorts are all built around the full-height mobile frame, and their algorithms reward content that fills the screen. For audiences under 35 in particular, the vertical feed is increasingly where they discover a moment, react to it and share it, often before they ever see it on a traditional broadcast.
Audiences now expect live moments to appear natively in the format of the platform they are watching on, often within seconds of the action happening.
For rights holders, that’s changed vertical from a ‘nice to have’ into a core part of the output. The question is no longer whether to produce vertical, but how to produce it at the same speed, quality and scale as the main broadcast, and that’s a production challenge, not a social-media one.
Vertical vs horizontal: what actually changes
It’s tempting to think of vertical as horizontal video turned on its side, but the two formats behave very differently. A 16:9 frame gives you width, room for the full field of play, wide shots and lower-third graphics. A 9:16 frame gives you height and very little width, so composition has to change completely.
In practice that means tighter framing on the subject, graphics designed for a narrow column rather than a wide bar, and a constant awareness of where the action sits in the frame. The result is that vertical production becomes less about resizing video, and more about rebuilding visual language for mobile-first viewing. (For a full breakdown of the formats, see our guide to choosing aspect ratios for live.)
How vertical video is produced: three approaches
There are broadly three ways to get to a vertical output, and they sit on a spectrum from manual to fully automated.
1. Native vertical capture
Shooting vertically from the start, a phone, or a camera framed for portrait, gives the cleanest result because the operator composes for 9:16 as they shoot. It’s ideal for behind-the-scenes, presenter pieces and social-first content, but it’s rarely practical as the primary capture for a full live event, where the main broadcast still needs 16:9.
2. Manual cropping and reframing
The most common approach is to take the existing 16:9 feed and reframe it to 9:16. This is exactly what most consumer tools do, they crop a finished clip after the fact, often with a fixed centre crop. It can work for static scenes, but for live sport or fast-moving action a fixed crop loses the play the moment it drifts toward the edges of the frame. Doing it well manually requires an operator actively repositioning the crop, which doesn’t scale when you’re producing dozens of moments an hour.
3. AI-tracked, automated reframing
The newest and most scalable approach uses AI to detect the subject and reframe to 9:16 in real time, keeping the action centred as it moves, effectively a virtual camera operator. Modern AI-based reframing systems, like AWS Elemental Inference, can now transform live horizontal broadcasts into vertical outputs in near real time, keeping the action centred dynamically as it moves across the frame. That’s the difference between a simple crop tool and broadcast-grade live vertical production.
Why broadcasters are investing in vertical video production
Vertical video is no longer just an engagement strategy. For broadcasters and rights holders, it is increasingly becoming a commercial one. Vertical feeds create new inventory for sponsorship, advertising and platform-native monetisation, while helping content owners reach audiences that may never engage with a traditional linear broadcast.
Vertical video formats and specifications
| Ratio | Typical resolution | Where it lives | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9:16 | 1080 x 1920 | TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Stories | The primary vertical format; fills the phone screen |
| 4:5 | 1080 x 1350 | Instagram / Facebook feed | Meta’s preferred portrait feed size |
| 1:1 | 1080 x 1080 | In-feed social posts | Square: a flexible middle ground, now less common for live |
Live vertical production: the harder problem
Producing vertical from finished footage is one thing. Producing it live, in real time, alongside a main 16:9 broadcast, is where vertical video production becomes a genuine broadcast discipline.
Live vertical usually takes the form of a dedicated vertical stream or a vertical alt-cast (sidecar broadcast), a parallel feed with its own framing, graphics and sometimes its own commentary, built for the mobile audience rather than cropped from the TV show. The challenge is doing this without doubling your crew or your control rooms. The teams getting it right produce the vertical output from the same live sources as the main broadcast, in the same workflow, so one production team delivers every shape the audience is watching in.
Consumer tools vs broadcast-grade production
It’s worth being clear about the distinction, because the two are often lumped together. Consumer vertical tools, the apps that auto-crop and caption a clip, are built to repurpose a single piece of finished content for one person’s social channel. They’re quick and cheap, and for that job they’re great.
Broadcast-grade vertical production is a different proposition: producing live, multi-camera vertical with real-time graphics, synced audio, ad insertion and simultaneous distribution to every platform, reliably, at the scale of a live sporting event, and fast enough to matter while the moment is still hot. That’s the bar for a rights holder, and it’s the part of “vertical video production” the consumer-tool tutorials don’t cover.
Where vertical video production is used
- Live sport: vertical match feeds, near-live clips and highlights for social, and dedicated vertical alt-casts.
- News: fast vertical cuts of breaking moments, formatted for mobile-first audiences.
- Music and entertainment: vertical streams of performances and events designed for the way fans actually watch on their phones.
- Brands and publishers: vertical-first content built to compete natively in the social feed rather than being squeezed into it.
How Grabyo approaches live vertical production
Grabyo enables broadcasters, leagues and publishers to produce horizontal and vertical outputs simultaneously from the same live workflow.
Using AI-powered reframing with AWS Elemental Inference, teams can transform live 16:9 feeds into platform-native 9:16 outputs in near real time, helping keep the action centred during live broadcasts without requiring separate productions or additional operators.
For editorial teams producing highlights, clips and social content, Grabyo also provides reframing tools directly within the clipping workflow, combining AI-assisted tracking with manual controls for moments that require tighter creative oversight or platform-specific framing decisions.
Rather than running separate workflows for broadcast and social, teams can produce once and publish everywhere, including TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, OTT and FAST platforms.
