Horizontal video is back in the feed. What changed this month

For about five years the rule was simple. Shoot vertical or don’t bother. This month both of the big short-form platforms quietly changed how landscape video appears in the feed, and the difference is already showing up in our clients’ numbers. A plain summary of what moved and what we’re doing about it.

What actually changed

Landscape clips used to sit in a letterboxed strip with black bars top and bottom, which told everyone to keep scrolling. Now the player expands the frame, lets the viewer rotate into full screen, and the algorithms have stopped treating wide video as a second-class citizen. Watch time on a sixteen-by-nine clip now counts the same as a nine-by-sixteen one.

Who this is good news for

Anyone with a back catalogue of wide footage, basically. We’re already seeing it help:

• Hospitality clients with drone footage of their venues.

• Charities with documentary-style films that never suited a phone screen.

• Property clients whose walk-through tours look cramped when cropped tall.

• Universities with lecture and campus content shot by their in-house teams.

What we’re changing at Lido

We’re not abandoning vertical. It still wins for talking heads, trends and anything shot on a phone. But from this month our Content Creation shoots will capture both orientations where it makes sense, so one day on location gives you a wider spread of posts. We’ll also be re-cutting older landscape films for a few clients and reporting back on how they land.

Got a hard drive full of wide footage gathering dust? Send it our way.