In 2026, nearly four in ten UK adults who regularly consume content (39%) watch short-form videos multiple times a day, increasing to 64% for 18–24-year-olds. Short-form is becoming the default lens through which audiences consume and discover content. As this trend becomes more popular, especially across younger audiences, service providers are pivoting to include more vertical content on their platforms.
Short-form is also helping shape discovery. But younger audiences aren’t looking for a doorway to a deeper layer, they are perfectly happy living in the bite-sized feed. If you are still viewing short-form as top-of-funnel marketing rather than a native, premium asset within your own ecosystem, you’re missing the boat.
The Explosion into the Market
In 2021, Netflix launched “Fast Laughs”, which started as a mobile experiment to mimic the TikTok scroll that has bled onto television screens. It works because it respects how people actually browse. Creating a feed that seems infinite. Younger audiences have grown up with algorithmic feeds and default to shorter attention spans for discovery, even if they still watch long-form once they’re hooked. More than 41% of Gen Z viewers admit that short-form consumption directly dictates whether they bother with longer formats. They aren’t going to scroll through a static horizontal grid of poster art anymore. Now, more platforms are following in their footsteps by adding video shorts. Recently, HBO announced that they are launching shorts as a method to increase engagement.
This isn’t just about low attention spans. It’s an entirely new content stream and economy. There’s been an influx of micro-dramas, highly produced, ultra-compressed vertical shows designed to be binged in 60 second increments on a phone. Omdia projects that US consumers are on track to spend over $1.5 billion on micro-drama subscriptions and per-episode micropayments.
The format is engineered to be addictive. Cliffhangers every 60 seconds, tight narrative loops are deliberate choices to get the attention of viewers. Short-form succeeds by front-loading hooks and compressing the emotional arc of longer content into a fraction of the runtime. 77% of viewers who have seen clips from TV shows or films on social media say they have gone on to watch the full program, short-form is more than discovery. For example, there are now over 184 million YouTube Shorts users. In order to keep audiences engaged, they need more than content.
Personalization is Needed
Adding an infinite feed isn’t enough. Volume doesn’t attract attention alone, relevance powers engagement. Personalization is needed even for vertical and short-form. True personalization has to be contextual and real-time. With short-form, you don’t have long before a user can change moods and if your algorithm takes twenty clips to realize they are no longer in the mood for comedy, they’ve already closed your app.
Audiences increasingly expect content that responds to them, rather than passive playback. This includes all devices. A viewer might discover a short-form clip on mobile, continue on a smart TV and then on a tablet. Rather than treating short-form as a one-size-fits-all output of long-form content, metadata-driven personalization allows clips to be served based on individual viewer context, not just what was cut, but what’s right for the user, right now.
XroadMedia and Short-form
Short-form video moves too fast for traditional recommendation engines, service providers need a solution that can react in real-time to understand users’ moods. To help your vertical feed stop looking like a random combination of adverts and make it start feeling like an intuitive dynamic UI, you need a flexible, real-time solution. With XroadMedia, we give every asset a Predictive Content Score, a rating for every asset based on preferences, so the feed can instantly adapt to users’ behaviors.
For meaningful personalization, good quality of metadata and/or user data is required. In today’s services, metadata for ‘scripted’ content (traditional live-TV or on-demand assets) is pretty good and, if not, can be easily enriched by XroadMedia with the help of ML and AI. Vertical content, particularly user-generated clips, sometimes lacks reliable metadata but makes up for it with high-quality usage information. When you want to bring different worlds together, you need a solution like XroadMedia’s that can adapt to the quality of data available, that can translate the learnings from one world to another and also allow editorial control to make sure the interests of users and service providers are considered alike.
By continuously recalculating viewer intent based on instant micro-behaviors, context and other metadata information such as device, XroadMedia transforms snackable video clips into your platform’s most powerful engine for conversion and churn prevention.
Want to know how you can tailor the whole of your user experience, including short-form? Get in touch.
