Netflix used its Q1 2026 earnings call on Thursday to confirm two of the biggest product shifts in the company's recent history: a TikTok-style vertical video feed arriving in its mobile apps this month, and a much broader push to use artificial intelligence across recommendations, production, and advertising. The announcement was reported by TechCrunch on April 17, 2026.
The moves arrive as Netflix posts another blockbuster quarter. Revenue climbed 16.2% year-over-year to $12.25 billion, while profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. The company reported around 325 million subscribers and said it still expects roughly $3 billion in ad revenue in 2026.
A vertical feed inside the streaming app
Netflix has been quietly testing a short-form, swipeable feed for more than a year. The company said that rollout begins this month. According to the earnings commentary, the feed will surface short clips from Netflix shows and films, and viewers will be able to tap a clip to jump straight into the full title, add it to their My List, or share it.
The feed is explicitly designed as a discovery layer for titles that struggle to break through in the traditional grid-based interface, including Netflix's growing library of video podcasts. For a service that has historically been organized around long-form viewing, it is a significant shift in how subscribers will find things to watch.
AI at the center of the roadmap
Co-CEO Gregory Peters used the call to pitch personalization as an ongoing AI opportunity rather than a solved problem. "We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies," he said, pointing to newer model architectures that allow faster iteration across different content formats.
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos framed generative AI as a tool for creators rather than a replacement. "AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life," he said during the call. Sarandos highlighted Netflix's recent acquisition of Ben Affleck's AI filmmaking startup InterPositive as a way to accelerate the company's internal generative video capabilities, describing the technology as "proprietary" and "created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking." He added that while Netflix's ownership is "very new," early creators testing the tools are showing "momentum."
Implications
For streaming, Netflix's vertical feed is the clearest sign yet that TikTok's interface has become the default grammar of mobile video, even inside premium subscription apps. For the AI industry, Netflix's framing matters: one of the largest entertainment distributors in the world is publicly committing to generative AI for filmmaking workflows while simultaneously leaning on newer recommendation models to squeeze more engagement from an already-optimized catalog.
The combination hints at how mainstream consumer tech will use AI over the next cycle — not as a standalone product, but embedded into every layer of discovery, production, and monetization inside apps that hundreds of millions of people already open every day.
