The dominance of short form platforms, like TikTok and YouTube, poses a growing challenge across the media landscape — impacting traditional broadcasters, sports rights holders and content aggregators alike. While these players continue to prioritize long-form content, a blind spot in short form strategies threatens the ability to attract, retain, and monetize audiences — especially younger viewers — effectively. If what’s past is prologue, this presents a serious threat to their streaming businesses, unless they recognize the opportunity rather than suffer the paradigm paralysis of their predecessors.
The market capitalizations of traditional media companies have been battered for years as consumer video habits shifted from broadcast and cable to streaming services. Not only have they lost viewership to the likes of Netflix and Amazon, but the lack of streaming profits, or in recent quarters, the small scale of these profits, has failed to offset the decline in high margin traditional media businesses.
And now, it appears they are once again late to the game on the emergent and rapidly maturing trend of short form video viewership.
YouTube and TikTok, and other social platforms, have rapidly grabbed consumers’ attention, taking an even-greater share of consumer video viewership. Among Generation Z consumers, the shift is even more evident: they watch over three hours of video content on YouTube and TikTok, combined, every day, compared to a little over one hour a day on streaming and traditional media platforms, combined.
Simply syndicating content, or placing ads on these platforms, while a necessary strategy, only further strengthens the position of YouTube and TikTok in reinforcing the network effect of these platforms, building an expanding moat for them while surrendering what will likely prove to be the next big media opportunity.
Disney, Warner, Fox, and Paramount, as well as other streamers, sports rights holders and content aggregation platforms, need to rapidly invest in both a content and product strategy to address consumers’ short form content needs — or risk losing their mindshare completely. Such investments can also serve their broader strategic objectives to build stickier platform ecosystems that help them reach new audiences, drive user engagement, and offer new monetization opportunities.
Let’s consider all of the ways this can serve their strategic interests: First, a short form in-app destination with a compelling content offering can be the foundation of building a daily habit with consumers to visit and use their app. Research shows that U.S. consumers use 9-10 apps as part of their daily rituals; short form video offers a compelling reason, with its bite-sized, refreshed content offerings, for them to start and end their days, or grab that small minute in between, within the streaming media ecosystem. Why should TikTok and YouTube get all the eyeballs?
A short form in-app destination also offers the opportunity to reach new audiences with an ungated (not behind a paywall) content offering, serving as a front porch to driving awareness and interest in high value subscriptions. It also offers the opportunity to drive existing subscribers to higher value, long-form content through promotion. And let’s not forget all of this drives increased ad inventory and opportunities for further monetization with Shopify-like experiences.
Of course, this will not be easy. These companies must understand how they can differentiate and better serve consumers.
From a content point of view, rights holders should leverage their existing catalog, and couple it with a proper short form video windowing strategy, as a first step into a short form video journey. Leveraging AI tools, trained on various use cases like sports and video on-demand content, can help accelerate their time-to-market and increase the velocity of publishing through tools that identify key moments, cut, verticalize and publish short form content derived from live, freshly premiering, and archival content.
This can be supplemented by direct investment in glossy, original short form content, dusting off the playbook from the now defunct Quibi. While Quibi lacked a strong data foundation to inform content investment, today’s streamers are well-positioned to leverage their mountains of data into an effective original shorts strategy. Furthermore, with fan engagement activations and AI-driven moderation tools, influencer and / or user-generated content could also play a role as consumers express their fandom and creativity around brands, adding to the content mix.
From a product point of view, these same companies need to invest in a destination within their respective streaming apps that caters to the short form experience. Instead of adapting a long form experience via rails and other quick-fixes to create a short form product, they must instead adopt a winning engagement format for shorts that includes vertical format, infinite scroll, personalization, and engagement tools like comments, emojis, graphics, clipping and sharing.
In short (pun intended), short form video represents a big opportunity that media companies can ill afford to miss. Content and product investments need to be made immediately to support the entirety of their content ecosystem, or these companies can only expect continued headwinds with consumers and investors alike. Let’s not forget the rest of the bard’s musings: what’s past is prologue, but the future is yet to be written. Smart money is on those building a future that includes a smart shorts programming strategy.
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