Vertical
Media
Summit

June 8-9Los Angeles, CA

Film was the first audiovisual language. TV was the second. Vertical video is something genuinely new: a $150B medium with its own economics, aesthetics, and audience behavior. Once a year, the people building Vertical and the people funding and distributing it are in the same room in Los Angeles.

Pre-register

Pre-register for early bird pricing before sales go public in January.

In the room, 2026

The rules of a $150B medium are being written here.

Microdramas are to Vertical what soap operas were to TV in the 1950s: one early genre, not the whole language. Television at maturity carried hundreds of subgenres. If you had watched a soap opera back then, would you have imagined that out of the same box we would one day get Game of Thrones, South Park and the Super Bowl? Vertical will evolve the same way: we already have vertical news, sports, reality, comedy, live shopping, interactive, even a wildlife documentary.

None of the economics are settled yet. Meanwhile a capital market is forming around the category: new companies, supply chains, equity and debt theses and roll-up opportunities.

The 2027 agenda

What is on the table.

What is on the table in 2027

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Where revenue has been, and where it is going. From IAP to subscriptions on and off-platform, advertising at scale, and commerce.

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Genre expansion past drama. News, sports, comedy, reality, animation, and their subgenres.

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Windowing and licensing. Between vertical and horizontal libraries.

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Measurement. The currency the category still does not have.

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Who owns the format. What talent and studio economics look like at different budget levels.

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AI-native production. The cost curve underneath everything: consumer acceptance and retention curves.

Counting down to

000

Days

Hours

Minutes

Seconds

June 8 and 9, 2027 · Los Angeles

Meetings

Vertical does not have a market week yet.

There is no Cannes, no week in the year when the platforms, studios, agencies, service providers, and capital are all in one place. These two days are built to be that week.

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Introductions we broker in advance.

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Private meeting tables and rooms, bookable as an add-on, with limited inventory released to pre-registrants first.

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Opening night on Tuesday, so Wednesday starts with people you met the night before.

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Invitation-only Speakers & Sponsors Dinner.

Pre-registration

Pre-register for 2027

Public sales open in January 2027, and this list gets there first: the venue and format reveal, the first speaker names, priority on meeting rooms, and an early commitment price that will not be repeated.

◯ Public sales open in January

The Vertical Economy Report

Owl & Co. put the vertical video economy outside China at $150B for 2026, up from $106B in 2025. At the inaugural summit we launched Phase One of the Vertical Economy Report, the first real map of where the money actually moves in this market. The deals, the buyers and sellers, and the companies quietly building the category. Contributors read the report before it publishes and see cuts of the data that never go public.
Add your company to join the map.

The second half edition lands in early 2027.

Read the report Join the map

$150B

Vertical economy outside China, 2026

+42%

Up from $106B in 2025

94%

Of vertical video revenue generated by Meta, ByteDance and YouTube

~40%

US share of ex-China revenue