Viewers of news (or any genre) now consume mostly on mobile vertically, while our streams still require viewers to flip their phones horizontally, which is not intuitive behavior for a mobile user. We aim to take on this user experience opportunity. News as a genre has many windows, and templates, which is a natural genre to use technology to detect and verticalize the viewing experience.

Our data show that the vast majority of our audience consumes news digitally via mobile, hence we knew we needed to be thinking mobile-first. We know that having a 16:9 stream is not conducive to a mobile user, who holds and consumes vertically in 9:16. So we set out to find an innovative way to stream in 9:16 without changing or adding operational requirements.

We teamed up with Wildmoka who provided a technology solution based on our needs, where every graphic template with windows is verticalized and recomposed in 9:16 through machine learning and artificial intelligence. The technology is also able to detect the change in program and dynamically change the background based on the background graphics of the shows, and also display the show logo, thereby maintaining the brand identity of the show even in vertical streaming. Where verticalization is not possible, we are able to detect the information from the headlines in the ticker and recompose it in the 9:16 real estate. To distinguish the ticker headlines from the current show, there is a label that shows "In other news".

This is a live 24/7 feed, that verticalizes whenever mobile users activate live stream in full screen.

In Feb 2021, we launched Phase 1 of our vertical project, where it was the MVP, serving vertical templates and dynamic backgrounds.

In June 2021, we launched Phase 2, where we integrated ticker information into the vertical stream.

Reach

• 25K total views (90% of which are mobile/tablet)

• Across 22K unique viewers (12% of users are recurring)

• Top 3 countries are Egypt (44%), KSA (38%), and UAE (2%)

Engagement

• Average time spent: 12m53s

• Viewership speaks on Saturdays and Sundays between 10am and 2pm