Turns out Paramount Skydance is up to more than just trying to keep Netflix from buying Warner Bros. Discovery.
It plans to compete with Netflix and Disney by adding short-form content to its flagship streamer Paramount+, Business Insider reports.
Internal documents revealed that Dan Reich, Paramount+’s Head of Global Product and Design, emailed fellow Paramount Skydance execs earlier this month, asking to set up a meeting with Paramount’s Product Chief Dane Glasgow. The subject of that meeting? Short-form clips.
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“We are trying to figure out how to jump-start efforts to get a million clips inot our Short Form UX as quickly as possible,” Reich wrote in the email, which was obtained by BI. He added that his “current understanding” was that Paramount’s machine learning team “has the clips ready (or near ready?).”
“As soon as we get the clips in, there will be increased pressure to provide a personalized feed of clips,” he said, noting that he’s looking for “workarounds” to “more quickly deliver the short form content into the experience.”
All of this adds up to Paramount+ subscribers getting short-form content on its mobile app sometime in the first quarter of this year. At first, that content will be clips from Paramount’s various properties, but the entertainment conglomerate is also interested in UGC, which it reportedly sees as a “cheap” way to “[bring] eyes to Paramount.”
None of this is surprising. Within the last two weeks, execs from both Disney and Netflix have unveiled plans to add or expand short-form in their own streaming services, chasing viewers’ shortened attention spans (or perceived shortened attention spans, at least) by competing with endlessly swipeable dopamine machines like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
Greg Peters, Netflix’s co-CEO, told investors his company hopes clips will help promote its bounteous slate of upcoming programming–mainly video podcasts, where it is (once again) in stiff competition with YouTube.
Meanwhile Disney’s EVP of Product Management, Erin Teague, told Deadline the Mouse House is “obviously thinking about integrating vertical video in ways that are native to core user behaviors.” A short-form feed will roll out to Disney+ later this year.
Basically, this is what happened with short-form on social media. Once TikTok began dominating in 2020, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and more all introduced their own copycats of it, desperate to catch the wave. Now streaming services, whose bread and butter is long-form content, are jumping on the same bandwagon in hopes that bite-sized clips will entice viewers to stick around for full-length movies and TV shows.
That being said, Paramount isn’t new to short-form content. It’s already posted hundreds of clips on its YouTube channel, where it has 2 million subscribers and brings in around ~60 million views per month. Those clips are, we imagine, quite similar to what it would use to populate a short-form feed on Paramount+. (They’ve also become a key part of how Gen Z and Alpha consume TV shows.)
The bump Paramount will have to get over is that YouTube is free, with an established audience of billions and a recommendation algorithm Google has spent decades tooling. The views Paramount content gets there may not translate to Paramount+, which has ~80 million subscribers and costs $14/month for ad-free viewing. In order to get people to look at its new short-form, Paramount will have to entice them to subscribe first–so maybe the focus should stay on external short-form deployment.
Whatever happens, though, studio-made short-form is clearly the name of the game for 2026.
