Disney is turning Disney Plus into yet another place you scroll, not just somewhere you parachute into on Friday night for the latest Marvel or Star Wars drop. Later this year, the streaming service is rolling out a TikTok-style vertical video feed on mobile, designed to feel more like a daily habit than a once-in-a-while destination.​

The new feed was teased at Disney’s Global Tech & Data Showcase during CES, an event that exists less for fans and more for advertisers who want guarantees that people will actually see their ads. Onstage, Erin Teague, Disney’s EVP of product management for Disney Entertainment and ESPN, sketched out a vision of a constantly updating stream of short clips that can pull from just about everything Disney owns. That means you could see original short-form series built specifically for vertical screens, quick-hit sports highlights, repurposed social clips from Disney’s massive presence on TikTok and Instagram, and chopped-up scenes from full-length films and shows.​

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Disney already tested the waters with “Verts,” a vertical tab it added to the revamped ESPN app last year. On ESPN, that feed is all about snackable highlights: big plays, trending moments, and social-style clips that give you a quick dose of sports without committing to a full game. Disney says the idea worked well enough there that it is now graduating to Disney Plus, where the content mix will be broader and fold in entertainment, news, and brand-new shorts.​

The timing of this move is not an accident. Vertical video has quietly become the default way a generation consumes video on phones, thanks to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and pretty much every app that wants attention from Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Disney’s own clips already rack up huge engagement on those platforms, but that attention currently lives on third-party apps with someone else’s ad products on top. Bringing that same “endless scroll of bite-sized stuff” energy into Disney Plus is a way to keep some of that behavior inside Disney’s own walls, with Disney’s own targeting and measurement stacked on top.​

Teague has been careful to stress that Disney doesn’t want this to feel like random clips just thrown in a vertical frame. The plan is a feed tuned to what you already watch: if you’re deep into Marvel, expect quick scenes, behind-the-scenes bits, and maybe creator-style explainers orbiting those worlds; if you mostly watch ESPN content, you’ll likely see sports-heavy snacks mixed in. Disney describes it as a “personalized, dynamic” experience that refreshes in real time based on your last visit, which is a very streaming-platform way of saying they want you to open the app every day just to see what’s new in the feed.​

There’s also an unavoidably commercial angle here. Disney used the same CES stage to pitch a suite of AI-powered advertising tools, including a video-generation system that can remix existing brand assets into TV-ready spots and dashboards that promise deeper insight into what actually gets people to pay attention. A vertical feed full of fast, repeatable inventory is catnip for advertisers, especially when you layer on targeting across sports, news, and entertainment inside one ecosystem. If you’re on the ad-supported Disney Plus tier, expect vertical video to be another place where those ads show up, woven between shorts and clips the way they are on other scroll-first apps.​

For viewers, this changes what “opening Disney Plus” even means. Right now, you generally go in with a mission: watch the new episode, pick a movie, maybe scroll a row or two and bounce. A vertical feed shifts that behavior toward ambient viewing—the “I’ve got five minutes, let me see what’s going on” use case that TikTok basically owns. That could be good if you like the idea of quick lore clips, character moments, or shorts filling the gaps between bigger viewing sessions, but it also risks making yet another app feel like an infinite slot machine of content.​

The competitive context is also hard to ignore. Netflix has experimented with vertical feeds like Fast Laughs and other short-clip carousels that surface moments from its shows and movies. YouTube built Shorts directly into the main app, turning it into a hybrid of traditional horizontal video and TikTok-style micro content. Disney is now following a similar playbook: don’t build a separate app, just bolt a vertical layer onto the flagship service and see how many people stick around.​

There are a few big open questions that will matter once this actually lands in the app. One is how aggressively Disney surfaces the vertical feed: is it a tab quietly tucked away for people who go looking for it, or does the app start opening directly into a full-screen vertical scroll on mobile the way TikTok does? Another is how often the clips are meant to stand alone versus acting as trailers for the full shows and movies. Teague has suggested that Disney doesn’t want the feed to feel like a pure teaser reel, but in practice, it’s easy to imagine a lot of clips ending with “watch the full story on Disney Plus,” because that’s how all of these systems ultimately work.​

There’s also the broader fatigue factor. People already scroll through feeds on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and a half-dozen other social apps that have copied that format. Disney’s bet is that a curated stream drawn from some of the most recognizable IP on the planet—Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Disney Animation, ESPN—will be strong enough to cut through. For fans, that might mean more ways to dip into those worlds in spare moments, without the commitment of sitting down for a full movie or game.​

What this really signals is Disney’s attempt to reshape Disney Plus into a habit, not just a library. A vertical feed that updates constantly, plus new ad tools and AI systems aimed at making every second more measurable, is the kind of infrastructure you build when you expect people to treat your app the way they treat TikTok or YouTube. Whether viewers actually want their premium streaming service to behave like another social feed is still up in the air, but Disney is clearly betting that the future of streaming is vertical, short, and always just one more swipe away.