PORTSMOUTH, N.H.—Social video on platforms like YouTube or TikTok continues to plays an outsize role in the lives of young viewers, at the expense of traditional premium, according to Hub Entertainment Research’s annual Video Redefined survey.

The survey found that young people spend more time watching “non-premium” online video than they do regular TV shows, consumers aged 13-24 estimate that 21% of all their entertainment screen time goes to non-premium video, compared to just 16% spent on traditional TV shows. In contrast, consumers age 35+ spend 39% of their screen time on TV shows – more than twice as much as they spend on online videos (14%).

“While consumers embrace social video as essential entertainment, many are aware that it may be at the expense of watching longer form TV and movies,” said Jason Platt Zolov, senior consultant at Hub and one of the study authors. “Studios have an opportunity to continue to lean into short-form to build connections with audiences - but bringing consumers back to longer-form content can potentially deepen engagement with brands in meaningful ways.”

“These findings underscore why YouTube became the first streaming platform to crack 10% share of total viewing on Nielsen’s Gauge,” added Jon Giegengack, Hub’s founder and co-author of the study. “The next generation of TV consumers recognize the difference between ‘premium’ and ‘non-premium’ content. They just don’t see premium as inherently ‘better.’ Either one is a perfectly legitimate way to spend the time you have available to watch TV.”

The survey indicated that short-form videos aren’t just filler content – about 60% of all viewers under age 35 say that short videos are just as much fun as “premium” TV. And while phones are still the most common screen for short-form video, respondents said that nearly a quarter of those videos are watched on a TV set.

Short-form videos take disposable time away from TV – but they also serve as a gateway for young people to discover longer content, the Hub study found. More than half (57%) of viewers 13-24 say they spend less time watching “regular TV” because of the time they spend watching services like YouTube and TikTok.

Yet, the survey also reported that young people still watch TV and that the relationship between social video and TV can be complementary. More than 60% of them say they often watch shows or movies that they discovered for the first time via clips on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram. In contrast, only 35% of viewers over age 35 discovered shows this way, making social video a powerful tool for engaging critical young audiences.

The growing usage of social video has also reached the point where many viewers are uncomfortable with the amount of time they spend on short-form video, the researchers reported. Close to half of those under 35 feel they spend too much time on platforms like TikTok or Instagram and might better spend their time with TV and movies. And even though viewers age 35+ spend less time with this content, a quarter of them (26%) feel the same way.

These findings are from Hub’s 2024 “Video Redefined” report, based on a survey conducted among 1,919 US consumers ages 13-47 with broadband access. Interviews were conducted in December 2024 and explored how consumer consumption of social video co-exists with viewing of traditional long-form TV and movies. A free excerpt of the findings is available on Hub’s website.

At 22 Frith Street in London there’s a plaque commemorating the first demonstration of moving images not involving film. A purist might point out that John Logie Baird’s television system was a mechanical monstrosity which could never have achieved even standard definition. Either way, those early experiments produced a dim, low-resolution image which was updated at less than ten frames per second—and was portrait in aspect ratio.

So, the fascination with tall, thin movies on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat might seem less like a new idea than a reincarnation of a very old one. The demand for material which works in those portrait frames isn’t really new, although a lot of what’s been released in portrait formats has been repurposed, sometimes rather approximately, from conventional landscape pictures. 

It’s perhaps inevitable in 2023 that AI has been pressed into service to automate conversions. When new material is being shot, meanwhile, it’s increasingly normal to target a portrait frame—or even derive both tall and wide frames from a single camera.

‘Just for Social?’
Leonidas Jaramillo is a DP and creative director with a background in camera and the allied trades of real-time interactive simulation for entertainment and virtual production. Jaramillo’s experience dates back to an experiment—not followed up—for Marvel in 2012. 

“There was a movie called ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ and we were going to make living portraits for the movie posters,” Jaramillo explained. “The plan was to have all these TVs flipped vertically in the little windows you have in front of movie theaters. I came from photography, and I was an IATSE member as well, and they enlisted me. I created movie posters of each of the characters, moving in the frame.”

Jaramillo quickly realized that the demand for sheer picture quality might not be much less than that facing the main unit of a major motion picture. 

“We couldn't shoot it 16:9 and then hope to crop in… I didn't know how big the poster displays were... there are displays inside theaters too,” he said. “At the time we were shooting 4K, 6K maybe, so I had to mount everything sideways and that was difficult because our tripods are not meant to take weight that way.” Since then, Jaramillo goes on, things have become “a little bit easier. Cameras are a little bit smaller and more modular. You can use an [Alexa] LF and crop out the 9:16 versions from that.”

Budget-conscious producers might wince at such thoroughbred equipment on a job that’s often described, Jaramillo recalls with chagrin, as “just for social. I could come back and say: Because it's for social, if you're not using an LF or an 8K Venice where you can dig into the resolution, I'd recommend a C300 mounted sideways. 

“I did a commercial [and] we had three [RED] Dragons all on custom made L-brackets,” he continued. “Sometimes they want to do both 9:16 and 16:9 and sharpness is an issue…  you can't compose someone on a third in a vertical format and hope they can compose it in a 16:9 as well. However they chop it up, you'll end up having them in the feather of the focus, which means you have to shoot deeper to get out of that, an f/5.6 or an 8. Now you're fighting light, how many photons do you have.”

“These mechanics are often lost on someone,” Jaramillo reflects. “You'll have a producer say ‘it’s only for social!’ There are a lot of regions of the Venn diagram where I'm going to fail, and the one we want is the one where it’s going to cost a lot of money. So much is riding on it. If Harrison Ford looks off of what people think he looks like, you get in trouble… you're saying ‘it's for social.’ That's our battle. The filmmakers of the 70s and 80s had to deal with pan and scan, things going to TV—‘oh man, don’t even look at it like that!’—and we have to deal with this.”

Dual Framing
Someone who’s become particularly used to dealing with it is Anna Gudbrands, a London-based cinematographer whose work includes short-form pieces for Relentless, Wonderbra and Zegna’s campaign with Jose Mourinho. Gudbrands’ recent projects have, she says, heavily involved dual framing. 

“I've been doing a lot of fashion and skincare in the summer... almost every single job I do now, they want an option for 9:16 which is Instagram, but they want the hero to be 16:9. The latest was Shoreditch Ski Club; another was for Augustinus Bader.” 

It’s a situation that inevitably involves compromise, so Gudbrands emphasizes collaboration. “If I see a challenge come up, I ask the client or the director which one really is the hero… and the decision is made on the spot—but I've never really had any problems with it, it's just a need to communicate well.”

Modern conveniences are helpful, but Gudbrands is careful to keep both frames in mind. “Most of the time I operate my own stuff, and I put up framelines in camera so I'm always aware of what's going on in the portrait format. I have the two brains and I go between them, always looking at my framelines for both. You do have to be a little bit wider—super-closeups can work well, but you have to keep in mind your lens choice. You want there to be some breathing space. You can do some close-ups, but not for the whole thing or it becomes confusing. It kind of becomes second nature.”

Gudbrands concurs with Jaramillo in that shooting for both portrait and landscape inevitably means creating a landscape image for later cropping. “If you lock the camera sideways you have the full frame but you won't have the [landscape]. Most of the time people want both,” she said. 

At the same time, working in the know-ledge that someone else will decide the frame makes the post experience particularly useful, according to Gudbrands.

“I don't sit in on edits, but I have experience of edits, so I know what cuts and what doesn't,” she said. “It's really helpful. But once you come on board, you know what the deal is. You and the director both know there's the two cut-downs, it's not a surprise.”

Enter AI
For the uncountable hours of material already in the archives, there’s artificial intelligence. Systems such as Videoverse’s Magnifi are built not only to produce a highlights reel of sports games, but also to re-frame the picture to suit any of several aspect ratios which might all be required. 

Doing either of those things by hand might be hopelessly labor-intensive; doing both without human intervention is genuinely disruptive, making new use of material that might otherwise have stayed dormant for no better reason than that it was difficult to use.

Meanwhile, consider broadcast camera operators. There’s not so much portrait here, but anyone capable of following a golf ball in flight is one of the more skilled people to lay hands on a moving-picture capture device. AI is emerging here, too, although it’s currently only mildly alarming to those people, possibly because AI cameras are mainly being deployed at events which might not otherwise have been covered at all. Pixellot’s camera system, for instance, has created whole new businesses by collapsing the cost of producing school sports for the small screen.

Still, for the time being there seems no immediate threat to the livelihoods of people who rely on their ability to keep a person, a ball, or an attractively-lit branded item inside a nicely-composed frame—no matter what shape that frame is. 

NEW YORK—Digital video measurement company Tubular Labs on Tuesday, Sept. 10, introduced new metrics for social video that are based on time spent viewing and de-duplicated audience engagement.

The new metrics are designed to provide a more TV-like measurement of attention and unique reach for social video globally.

“Technology has made audiences global, mobile and social, but the current measurement products are country-specific, often missing mobile, and are seriously lacking in social coverage—leading to confusion and locked economics for online video,” said Rob Gabel, founder and CEO at Tubular Labs. “Our vision is to drive the same transparency in global social video that the industry already has for radio, TV and websites, delivering key insights that change the way both media and brands transact on video.”

Media buyers are looking for an apple to apple way to measure and compare video from platform to platform, whether traditional TV, digital video, over-the-top or social.

Tubular said that the lack of comparable metrics for social video has limited the amount of revenue publishers can earn, despite the trillions of views social video generates.

The new time-based video measurement approach was co-developed with a consortium of online publishers through the Global Video Measurement Alliance, and its members Viacom, Ellen Digital Network, Corus Entertainment, Vice, BuzzFeed, Group Nine and Media Chain; new to the group this fall are Discovery and Brut.

“Working with our GVMA members and early access customers, we are rapidly making progress to commercialize and release our new measures that will reveal a comprehensive picture of global audience reach and engagement for social video, bringing long-needed parity to the industry’s accepted linear standards” said Neil Patil, chief commercial officer at Tubular Labs. “This will include standardized time-based views across platforms, true global de-duplicated reach, total watch time, average watch time per unique viewer, audience demographics and location, and special reporting features.” 

This story originally appeared on TVT's sister publication B&C.