Though Tattle TV - a UK-based streaming platform created by filmmakers Philip McGoldrick and Marina Elderton - features a reality dating series about dog-owners and a modern drama about a female MMA fighter, the company's latest debut is a vertically-oriented edit of Alfred Hitchcock's silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Similar to other microdrama apps, Tattle TV splits all of its content into short segments that can be purchased individually using an in-app currency (Tattle Coins).
On Tuesday, Amazon announced that its Fire TV devices, including Fire TV Stick products and TVs with Fire TV as its built-in operating system, will be the first to get a standalone Instagram app from Meta, part of a pilot program that will presumably eventually expand to other platforms. The Instagram app for Fire TVs will focus primarily on Reels, the short-form video product that, frankly, does not seem like it belongs on TVs.
Younger audiences behave this way most strongly, but they're not alone. Vertical video has quietly become a cross-generational news discovery system. All age groups are consuming more online news video each year, and the share of people watching social videos as a new source has risen from 52% to 65% since 2020, according to the 2025 Reuters Institute Digital News Report.
It may seem like publishers are " pivoting to video " all over again, with news outlets like Time, CNN, The New York Times adding more vertical video to their sites and apps in the last few months. But it's different this time around. The big push into video production 10 years ago was centered on distribution to social media platforms, following Facebook's shift to prioritizing video content.
