Guillermo Bertossi

Video, Photography, Tech, Digital weirdness. former Fox, Disney, AWS, now at @hacelashorta

[Hernan Lopez @hernanlopez]

Vertical video is on track to generate $150B in revenue ex-China in 2026, up 42% year-over-year.

Yesterday, 250 operators, investors, and builders gathered in Hollywood for the first Vertical Media Summit, a working session where the category's biggest questions got real answers.

"First came Film. Then came TV. Talent pools, aesthetics, business models were born miles apart.
Vertical is the third audiovisual language", from my opening keynote.

What we learned:

→ At least three vertical-native companies are now billion-dollar businesses by revenue. Joey Jia, co-founder and CEO of ReelShort, told me on stage that 75% of their revenue already comes from subscriptions. The IAP-first model is evolving faster than most expected.

→ TikTok and Sundance Collab announced a micro-series writing program, unveiled by Dawn Yang. The largest vertical native platform in the world is now commissioning original scripted.

→ COL Group's Timothy Oh announced "Mapogo: The Lion Throne," the first premium vertical wildlife documentary. Vertical is branching into genres nobody saw coming.

→ Holywater Tech previewed exclusive behavioral data from a first-of-its-kind study conducted with Owl & Co: male viewership and younger audiences are surging. Full study drops next week.

Rich Greenfield put it plainly from the stage: "Take vertical video seriously or be disrupted."

The room included @YouTube, @Google, CAA, @NBCUniversal, Fox, East West Bank, WaterTower Ventures, LionTree, and dozens of producers, investors, and founders building what comes next.

Thank you to our moderators Mary Ann Halford and @natjarv, our sponsors East West Bank, Talent Systems, and MonkeyPaw Post, and media partner @Variety.

One ask: We announced phase one of the Vertical Economy Report, the first systematic effort to map how value flows through this category. If you are or want to be in the space, complete the survey linked below, and we will share the core findings with those who contribute while helping you make connections.

The companies that treat vertical as a format will miss the boat. The ones that treat it as a language will build the next decade of enterprise value.

If you're trying to figure out where you fit, that's what Owl & Co does. Let's talk.

My full keynote and other highlights coming up in the next issue of Streamonomics.

https://t.co/oz8Plny0H7

[Reve @reve]

Today, we’re launching Reve 2.0, the best 4K image model in the world.

We invented a new way to generate and edit any image using precise layouts. For the first time, it’s possible to create images you can touch.

[Guillermo Bertossi @guillebe]

Jubilada y Peligrosa https://t.co/LeeEWO50Fd

[Nathan Clark @nathanclark_]

it’s in gemini, just create it in ai studio. oh, that’s for your personal google one account. for workspace you need gemini business. no, not gemini advanced, that’s ai pro now. unless you need ai ultra. oh agents? you do that in spark actually. no, not gemini api managed agents, that’s different. for coding use jules. unless you mean the agentic ide, that’s antigravity. no, that’s the old antigravity, download the new one. actually gemini cli is being deprecated, use antigravity cli. no the flash model is smarter than the pro model. unless you need pro. if it’s video, use flow. no, flow uses veo. no, nano banana is images. actually that’s in gemini now. unless you’re in search, then it’s ai mode. no, research is notebooklm. anyway it’s all very simple.

[Guillermo Bertossi @guillebe]

Could not agree more

[@levelsio @levelsio]

I'm just as surprised nobody in AI voice tech has realized a voice needs background and environmental noise to sound realistic

Even @ElevenLabs the leader in voice AI can not produce voice with background noise, or environment reverb sound

AI voices are always going to sound non-passable as human if they don't have that

And it's only me and this other guy even talking about it

[@levelsio @levelsio]

I'm just as surprised nobody in AI voice tech has realized a voice needs background and environmental noise to sound realistic

Even @ElevenLabs the leader in voice AI can not produce voice with background noise, or environment reverb sound

AI voices are always going to sound non-passable as human if they don't have that

And it's only me and this other guy even talking about it

[Shorta @hacelashorta]

72 años. Exagente. Sin paciencia.
Jubilada y Peligrosa ya disponible en Shorta.

[Guillermo Bertossi @guillebe]

@om_patel5 the music is nuts

[Guillermo Bertossi @guillebe]

@motion_so @mosaic_so Motion

[NewtopiaVC @NewtopiaVC]

@haceloshorta is live 🎥

Founded by Oscar winner Armando Bo, @tomasescobar and tech entrepreneur @aarrieta , Shorta is launching LATAM’s first premium vertical fiction platform. 500+ series across LATAM by 2027. Multi-genre.

Proud early backers 💪🏼
https://t.co/srcRkfM3d5

[Deadline @DEADLINE]

'Birdman' Co-Writer Armando Bo Among Trio Launching Latin American Vertical Video Platform Shorta https://t.co/SGky1sgfqO

[Shorta @hacelashorta]

independencia.
08.04.26

[Shorta @hacelashorta]

fuerte al medio.
30.03.26

[Cveintiuno @CveintiunoMedia]

Armando Bo, el fundador de Cuevana y el empresario Ariel Arrieta lanzan la plataforma de microdramas Shorta https://t.co/GWez6Lt5uU

[Shorta @hacelashorta]

30.03.26

[Guillermo Bertossi @guillebe]

@starks_arq @tether stark

[Bilawal Sidhu @bilawalsidhu]

People are undoubtedly a little alarmed at having unwittingly helped build a 3D map of the world for Niantic by contributing 30 billion crowdsourced images. I interviewed Niantic's CTO Brian McClendon about exactly this in a TED interview last year -- he's also the guy who co-created Google Earth.

But let's put it in perspective. Pokestop data isn't what you think it is. It's not a surveillance panopticon of your neighborhood. These are static captures of parks, statues, murals, landmarks -- the places people congregate. Brian described it as "building the map from the bottom up, from the locations where people spend time."

Think of these 20 million waypoints as basically the inverse of what Google mapped with Street View. Google mapped the drivable streets. Niantic mapped where people actually hang out. Cool data, genuinely useful for visual positioning -- but very different from what the headlines imply.

And lest we forget that Niantic is just one of many companies quietly building their own map of the world right now -- and they're all capturing different facets of reality:

>🚶 person-level: Axon body cams on hundreds of thousands of officers. Meta Ray-Ban glasses capturing first-person POV at scale -- overseas operators reviewing images every time someone says "Hey Meta."

> 🚗 vehicle-level: Tesla dashcams on every car in the fleet, massive onboard compute extracting and distilling data to the cloud. Waymo with cm-accurate 3D maps of every city they operate in. Fleet telematics cameras on delivery vehicles globally.

> 🏠 street & home-level: Flock Safety deploying CCTV across neighborhoods and cities. Amazon with Ring cameras on every doorstep and mailroom (recently got dragged over that Super Bowl commercial about fusing all these cams together to find your dog) plus dashcams on every Prime delivery van. Roomba mapping your floor plan every time it vacuums -- Amazon wanted that data badly enough to try acquiring iRobot for $1.7B before regulators shut it down.

> 🥽 headset-level: Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest build a 3D model of whatever room you're in every time you put them on. Between Ring, Roomba, and your headset, your entire home is being spatially understood by at least three different companies.

>📍platform-level: Google with Street View cars, aerial planes, satellite imagery, and live location from every Android phone in your pocket. Apple doing the same with mapping cars AND every LiDAR iPhone is quietly a 3D scanner. And yeah, despite the "Apple is too privacy-conscious" narrative, they're collecting location data too.

>🏃 trajectory-level: Strava mapped every running and cycling trail on Earth -- and accidentally exposed secret military bases in Afghanistan and Syria because soldiers logged their jogs. When you aggregate enough individual trajectories, patterns emerge that were never supposed to be visible.

> 🛰️ space-level: Planet Labs imaging the entire Earth's landmass every single day from orbit. Vantor capturing it in higher detail. Iceye doing it in 3D using SAR. If something changes anywhere on the planet -- a building goes up, a forest burns down, a military convoy moves -- before-and-after imagery within 24 hours.

Fused together -- we have everything from body cam to dashcam to doorbell to phone to satellite -- every layer of physical reality is being mapped by somebody right now. Different sensors, different angles, different purposes. Same pattern.

The interesting part is how they incentivize it. Google spends billions. Mapillary tried altruism. Hivemapper grinds with crypto. Pokémon GO cracked something none of them could: a game mechanic that subsidizes the scanning behavior. You're not building a map. You're catching pokemon. The map is just a side effect.

3D scanning is still a niche hobby for reality capture nerds like me. The moment somebody gamifies dense 3D capture at scale -- not posed photos but actual geometry -- that's when this blows wide open.

Niantic sold the games for $3.5B but kept the spatial platform, with a data-sharing agreement in place. One team makes the game great, the other builds the spatial infrastructure underneath. Incentives finally aligned.

Gaming is becoming a way for humans to contribute real-world trajectories that help physical AI learn about the real world. Google does it with live traffic. Tesla does it with autopilot. The mechanic is different but the pattern is identical -- and most people are already part of at least one -- if not a majority -- of these datasets whether they realize it or not.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The New York Times made news the loss leader for a $2 billion digital revenue machine, and this chart is the receipt.

News-only subscribers dropped 65% since June 2022. Bundle subscribers grew 227%. That looks like a news collapse. But the NYT deliberately killed its standalone news product. They stopped marketing it. They made it nearly impossible to buy a news-only subscription on their website. They priced the full bundle (News + Games + Cooking + Athletic + Wirecutter) at $2/month introductory, cheaper than a standalone Games subscription.

News-only ARPU is $13.33. Bundle ARPU is $12.92. Single non-news product ARPU is $3.36. Those 4.3 million single-product subscribers paying $3.36/month? They’re not the business. They’re the funnel. The NYT CEO said it explicitly on the earnings call: single products are “funnels to get people to subscribe” to the bundle.

Games now accounts for over 50% of time spent inside the NYT app. Wordle, Connections, and the Mini pull 10+ million weekly players who never intended to read a news article. But half of all NYT subscribers now pay for the bundle, and bundle subscribers retain longer, engage more, and accept price increases. The bundle just went from $25 to $30/month.

The result: digital revenue crossed $2 billion for the first time in 2025. Free cash flow hit $550 million. Adjusted operating margins reached 24% in Q4. Berkshire Hathaway just took a billion-dollar position. While the Washington Post cut 300 journalists last week, the Times added 1.4 million subscribers.

This chart shows a news company that built an attention ecosystem where Wordle gets you in the door, Cooking keeps you at breakfast, The Athletic owns your commute, and by the time you think about canceling, you’d lose four products instead of one.

The NYT figured out that the way to fund journalism in 2026 is to make sure you can’t quit the crossword.

[Tomáš Procházka @tomasproc]

pencil autocomplete #3

realtime model: FLUX.2 [klein] by @bfl_ml via @fal

[Guillermo Bertossi @guillebe]

@SamsungMobile #stop