Grab your phone and hold it vertically, because Disney+ just changed the game. The streaming home of Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and practically every franchise you grew up loving has officially launched Verts, its brand-new swipeable short-form video feature, and it is available to U.S. subscribers right now. Yes, Disney+ now has a TikTok-style feed. No, you are not dreaming.
The feature lives inside a new icon in the Disney+ mobile app. Tap it, and you are dropped into an endlessly scrolling, vertically formatted feed of clips and scenes pulled straight from Disney’s legendary entertainment library, spanning more than a century of movies and TV shows. Swipe through a moment from a Marvel film, land on a scene from a beloved Pixar classic, stumble onto something from the Star Wars universe you somehow never got around to watching. From any clip, you can add the full title to your Watchlist or jump straight into playback. It is part discovery tool, part digital rabbit hole, and it is powered by a personalized recommendation algorithm designed to learn exactly what kind of content fan you are.
And yes, you can absolutely blame TikTok for all of this.
The swipe mechanic, the vertical format, the algorithm that knows what you want before you do, the whole philosophy of short-form video that finds you instead of making you go looking, that is TikTok’s blueprint, and Disney has now fully adopted it. The signs were building for a while. Instagram Reels exploded. YouTube Shorts became unavoidable. Netflix quietly added a vertical video feed to its mobile homepage earlier this year. The streaming industry spent years watching social platforms eat their lunch in terms of daily engagement, and one by one, the major players have started fighting back on the same turf. Disney, characteristically, waited until it could do it with some weight behind it.
The company actually tested the concept first on ESPN. When the revamped ESPN streaming app launched in August 2025, it included a Verts tab, giving Disney a proving ground to see how real users responded to the format. The response, according to Disney insiders, was strong enough to justify bringing the experience to the flagship entertainment platform. The name, and the lessons learned, made the jump with it.
Erin Teague, the Executive Vice President of Product Management for Disney Entertainment and ESPN, has been refreshingly direct about why this move was necessary. “This is what Gen Z and Gen Alpha are expecting,” she said when the feature was first announced at Disney’s Tech + Data Showcase at CES back in January. “They are not necessarily thinking about sitting down, watching a long-form, two-and-a-half-hour piece of content on their phones.” For a Disney executive to say that out loud is kind of a big deal. It is the company openly acknowledging that the next generation of fans lives on their phones, scrolls vertically, and was raised on an algorithm, and that Disney needs to speak that language if it wants to stay relevant.
What makes Verts more than just a copycat feature is where Disney says it plans to take it. Right now, the feed is built from clips edited out of the existing library, so your favorite movie moments and TV scenes cut down for the vertical format. But Disney has already signaled that original short-form content is coming. Creator content celebrating Disney’s fandoms is reportedly being explored. And given Disney’s licensing deal with OpenAI’s Sora announced earlier this year, AI-generated short-form content could eventually find its way into the mix too. Disney is framing Verts as the very first scene of what it calls a multi-season series, which, coming from Disney, feels like exactly the kind of long-game promise the company tends to actually follow through on.
The competitive context here matters for fans to understand. Fox One launched with a built-in vertical video feed last August. Fox Corporation invested in Holywater, the company behind the wildly popular My Drama micro-drama app, just last October. Peacock has been running its own vertical experiments and reporting solid engagement gains. The streaming wars have a new front, and it is your phone screen, turned upright.
For Disney+ subscribers, the most immediate and exciting implication is discovery. One of the most common complaints about streaming platforms is that finding something new to watch feels like a part-time job. Verts is Disney’s answer to that problem, a feed that does the browsing for you, serving up moments from across the Disney, Hulu, Star Wars, Marvel, and National Geographic libraries and trusting the algorithm to surface the thing that makes you stop scrolling and actually watch. If the ESPN rollout is any indication, it works.
Whether this all feels magical or mildly unsettling will probably depend on your age and your relationship with TikTok. But one thing is clear: the version of Disney+ that exists today looks meaningfully different from the one that existed last week, and the one that exists a year from now will likely look different still.
Verts is live now on the Disney+ mobile app in the United States.
