Disney+ is taking on YouTube Shorts and social media scrolling by launching a feed called Verts for vertical videos. 

Available to US Disney+ subscribers on mobile devices starting this week, Verts will feature short vertical clips from movies and series available on the streamer. It’s meant to help viewers discover new content, and they can go right from the shorts they’re watching to the film or show it’s from, or add the title to their watchlist to check out later. 

Disney is making no secret of the fact that it wants to replicate the experience of scrolling through clips on TikTok. Swiping through short videos is the way many viewers are already discovering Disney’s content, and it’s aiming to cater to that same behavior pattern with Verts.

Disney put out a brief release about the launch, and while it’s light on specific details, the company said its early experiments on Disney+—and the quiet launch of Verts for ESPN with sports clips in August—has “driven additional engagement”.

Verts brings the social-media native experience of scrolling through clips into the streamer, in an effort to drive engagement and discovery.

The launch of Verts is just a first step in a bigger Disney+ push into vertical video, according to the release. For now, the company’s goal is to drive discoverability. But in the long term, Disney says there’s an opportunity to add content from creators—much like it did last year in a test-run with pocket.watch, by temporarily adding creator-made YouTube videos about Lilo & Stitch. 

Verts could also be a destination for original vertical content, which Disney has already begun to produce with Locker Diaries, a series of shorts filmed from inside the school lockers of fan-favorite Disney Channel characters. This project is designed to capitalize on the popularity of low-cost, snackable microdramas that have emerged from China, but aging the trend down play to a younger crowd.

In the meantime, Disney clips are huge on YouTube. One Short from the original Lion King film has 3.2 million views, and a clip from the Disney Channel’s Tangled the Series is up to 1.9 million. Both videos are obviously benefitting from being on YouTube, without anything actually happening within Disney’s ecosystem. Verts could be the company’s opportunity to change that. 

Disney first announced that Verts was coming to Disney+ in January, during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. At the time, Disney heralded it as a move to set the streamer up as a “must-visit daily destination“.