On April 30, 2026, Netflix rolled out "Clips," a personalized, swipeable, vertical video feed inside its mobile app. The company pitched it as a curated highlight reel to help members decide what to watch next without endless scrolling.

Five years ago, the wave of TikTok clones was easy to dismiss as a passing imitation cycle. But today, it has become the prerequisite for attention; LinkedIn, sports leagues, retailers, CPG brands, and now streamers have all converged on the same interface, and on the same distribution logic.

This is what the creator playbook looks like: vertical, personalized, and scalable.

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Streaming and broadcast

The pattern across "big streaming" in 2026 is consistent:

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Netflix‍

Netflix Clips ships as a discovery tool. It's an in-app highlight reel of trailers and moments from existing originals. CTO Elizabeth Stone has been explicit that Netflix isn't trying to be TikTok. It's trying to solve the discovery problem TikTok exposed.

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Disney+

Disney+ is following close behind. At CES 2026, the company announced plans to roll out Verts. The new feed is expected to mix original short form content, repurposed social clips, and scenes adapted from existing films and series.

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Peacock and Tubi

Peacock and Tubi have added their own vertical surfaces, with Tubi's "Scenes" feature live since 2024.

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Fox

Fox Entertainment launched Fox Creator Studios, a digital first division that partners directly with creators on formats and IP, opening with food content from Gordon Ramsay, Rosanna Pansino, Jolly, Sorted Food, Food Theorists, and Little Remy Food.

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The legacy distribution moat, owning the home screen, the cable bundle, the linear schedule, has been eroded by viewers who now spend hours a day inside vertical feeds. If the streamer can't surface its own content in a format the audience already prefers, the audience will find something else inside TikTok or Shorts that they like just as much.

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Publishers and revenue

If streamers are playing defense on attention, publishers are playing offense on ad dollars.

Time has partnered with ad-tech platform Media.net to embed vertical video on nearly every article page. Time's COO Mark Howard has framed video advertising as the publisher's biggest growth driver heading into 2026.

People Inc., TMB, and Hearst are testing a similar format, internally referred to as "Bytes", across different placements and designs.

Recurrent Ventures has reported that essentially all of its growth now sits in video and experiential content.

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If publishers can match creator economy ad formats with creator economy content surfaces, they can recapture some of the spend that has been migrating to TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. Whether the audience returns the visit is a separate question, but the inventory has to exist before the dollars can.

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What these examples have in common: the operating principles

Across streaming, publishing, professional networking, and CPG, the same set of principles keeps surfacing. Together, they read as a working definition of the creator playbook applied at corporate scale.

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The real story of vertical video in 2026 is which companies are willing to take on the operating model that built TikTok: small autonomous teams, native voice, and scale.

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