Is Short Entertainment the New Entertainment?

With Instagram introducing Reels, YouTube prioritizing YouTube Shorts, Snapchat giving out 1 million a day for Snapchat spotlight users, and TikTok being the king of it all, it begs the question: are long-form videos dead?

The transition from 2-hour long movies being the most popular to watch, to now 1-minute maximum has been fast.

It all started with Vine, a short-form video app where users shared 6-second-long, looping video clips. The app launched in 2013, only to be shut down after three years. Then along came Musical.ly, a 15-second lip-sync video app, which ended up merging with TikTok, a 60-second video-sharing app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

It all went uphill from there.

Though we may not know the future, we can be assured that not all long form entertainment is dead. Netflix, with their hours-long series, is still breaking viewing records every month, like their new hit series Bridgerton, being viewed by 80 million households within 4 weeks.

The good news is short-formed entertainment is relevant to this generation’s attention span which is only 8 seconds long. Unfortunately, that’s 4 seconds shorter than twenty years ago.