Technology 5 min read By Callum Montgomery
Snips CEO Or Ben Shimon on Turning Hollywood Films Into Vertical Binge Content
The Israeli startup Snips is repackaging full-length Hollywood movies into short vertical episodes designed for mobile viewing, and its CEO Or Ben Shimon has set out seven content lessons for producers and platforms looking to win attention in a crowded short-form market.
Snips, a startup that converts full-length Hollywood films into short vertical episodes built for mobile screens, is betting that the future of premium video lies not in longer runtimes but in tighter, more repeatable bursts of story. Its chief executive, Or Ben Shimon, has distilled the company's approach into seven content lessons aimed at producers, studios and platforms trying to hold attention in an increasingly crowded short-form market.
The core proposition is straightforward. Rather than treating vertical video as a home for user-generated clips or marketing snippets, Snips takes existing feature films and reworks them into serialised episodes that viewers can watch in sequence. The format borrows the grammar of social media — portrait framing, quick cuts, episode hooks — but applies it to professionally produced narrative content. The result is a hybrid product that sits between streaming and the endless scroll of short-video feeds.
Ben Shimon's first lesson concerns meaning rather than mechanics. Translating a film into vertical form is not simply a matter of cropping the frame or cutting scenes at random. The editorial task is to preserve what the story is actually about, so that a two-hour narrative still lands with emotional force when it is broken into fragments. That requires deciding which plot points carry the weight of the original and which can be compressed without losing the thread.
Protecting emotional truth is a related discipline. Short-form audiences may arrive without context, so each episode has to deliver a clear emotional beat while still serving the larger arc. Ben Shimon's guidance suggests that the strongest adaptations treat emotion as the through-line, using performance, pacing and music to carry feeling across episodes even when explanatory dialogue is trimmed.
A third lesson centres on giving viewers a reason to return. In a feed environment, completion is not the only metric that matters; the next episode is. Snips' model depends on building enough momentum at the end of each instalment to pull the audience into the following one, a technique familiar from serialised television but applied at a much faster rhythm.
The remaining lessons address craft and strategy. Vertical framing changes how scenes read, so close-ups and character faces become more valuable than wide establishing shots. Pacing must be recalibrated for shorter attention spans without turning every episode into a highlight reel. And the release strategy matters as much as the edit: how episodes are sequenced, how often they appear and how they are surfaced to new viewers all shape whether a title finds an audience.
Snips is not alone in pursuing this territory. Streaming platforms, studios and social companies have all experimented with mobile-first formats, but most efforts have relied on original short content or promotional clips rather than the systematic adaptation of existing films. By positioning itself as a converter of Hollywood libraries, Snips is testing whether established intellectual property can be given a second life in a format that younger viewers already understand.
For the wider media industry, the lessons carry a commercial edge. Back catalogues represent sunk cost and dormant value; if they can be re-edited into bingeable vertical series at reasonable cost, studios gain a new route to monetisation without commissioning fresh productions. Platforms, meanwhile, gain premium content that fits the viewing habits of mobile users.
The open question is whether audiences will accept feature films in this compressed form, or whether the loss of cinematic scale proves too great. Ben Shimon's seven lessons amount to an argument that the trade-off can work when adaptation is treated as an editorial craft rather than a technical conversion. If Snips is right, the next wave of short-form competition may be fought not over who can produce the most clips, but over who can best translate stories that were made for a very different screen.
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