The Third Language
What a hundred years of media history says about the vertical video gold rush
A Sidebar from this week’s Vertical Media Summit in Los Angeles, California…
I spent the afternoon of June 3rd in a room at the W Hollywood watching a very good argument get made on vertical LED screens. The Vertical Media Summit is a half-day event hosted by Owl & Co, the media and tech advisory firm run by Hernan Lopez, and Lopez built the whole thing around a single claim he laid out in the opening keynote. Film was the first audiovisual language. Television was the second. Vertical video is the third, something genuinely new, with its own economics, aesthetics, and audience psychology, and most of it is still up for grabs.
He made the case well. The line that stuck with me was his evolution analogy. If you had watched a daytime serial in 1950, he asked, would you have imagined that the same box would one day give you Game of Thrones, South Park, and the Super Bowl? Microdramas, in his telling, are to vertical what soap operas were to early television. An early, slightly embarrassing…
