Netflix does not just want your movie night anymore. It wants your 13-minute lunch break, too.
Starting Aug. 3, Netflix will begin adding short and mid-length videos from major digital publishers directly to its homepage, giving subscribers a new way to watch internet-native series without leaving the app.
The first wave of partners includes BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, People Inc., Tastemade, and PMX, a Penske Media subdivision that includes The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Eater, Indiewire, Rolling Stone, and Variety. The rollout will be available to Netflix members at all subscription levels in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
The videos will range from quick three-minute clips to roughly 20-minute episodes and cover food, travel, fashion, entertainment, wellness, design, celebrity interviews, home tours, and other lifestyle topics.
In other words, the kind of stuff people already fall into on YouTube when they mean to watch one Vanity Fair lie detector test and somehow end up 45 minutes deep into celebrity home tours.
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Netflix says the lineup will include both licensed past videos and new ongoing series. Among the titles coming to the platform are Architectural Digest‘s “Open Door,” BuzzFeed’s “I Draw, You Cook,” Elle‘s “Where Is the Lie,” People‘s “My Life in Pictures,” and Tastemade’s “Struggle Meals.” Other announced franchises include BuzzFeed Celeb’s “30 Questions,” Vanity Fair’s “Lie Detector,” Harper’s Bazaar‘s “Burning Questions,” Billboard‘s “24 Hrs With,” Variety‘s “How Well Do They Know?,” and Travel + Leisure‘s “Travel Unfiltered.”
For Netflix, the move makes sense. The streamer built its reputation on full seasons, bingeable dramas, prestige documentaries, stand-up specials, and original films. But the way people watch videos online has changed. Sometimes viewers want a two-hour movie. Sometimes they want a 13-minute celebrity interview, Get Ready With Me, or a fashion explainer while they eat lunch. Netflix is now trying to ensure those shorter viewing moments can happen on its platform, too.
“Members don’t just want to watch a show or film and move on; they want to keep exploring the stories and personalities they love long after the final credits roll,” John Derderian, Netflix’s vice president of animation series and kids and family TV, said in the announcement on TUDUM, the platform’s official editorial hub. “These partnerships help us deepen fandom and create more ways for members to carry those stories with them throughout their day.”
The new publisher videos also arrive as Netflix has been expanding beyond its traditional TV-and-movie identity. The company has added games, live events, sports programming, comedy specials, and video podcasts, all while testing new ways to make the app feel less like a library and more like a place to spend time.
Many of the announced series are the exact kind of polished, publisher-made videos that became major digital franchises on YouTube, the reigning media distributor in the U.S.: celebrity Q&As, lie detector interviews, cooking videos, fashion segments, home tours, travel shows, and bite-sized lifestyle series. Of course, Netflix is not replacing YouTube, but it is clearly interested in some of the viewing behavior that YouTube watchers expect — and social media users have noticed the connection.
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There are still some open questions. Netflix has not said exactly how these videos will be surfaced, how the platform will recommend them, or how much they will be tied to related shows, movies, and talent. It has also not announced the full slate of future publisher partners.
But the direction is clear, and pretty soon, internet videos will live where your prestige dramas or true-crime documentaries already do.
