Vurt wants you to look at vertical videos as a genre of their own
The genre framing is the smartest thing anyone has said about vertical video in a while. Most streamers treat it as a distribution problem. They take the show, crop it, add captions, and push it to a feed. Vurt is pointing at something deeper, that a vertical frame changes how you compose a shot, how long a scene can breathe, and how a viewer holds the phone. That is a different creative discipline.
I'm curious what Vurt actually ships though. Is it a production tool, a set of guidelines, a studio? The pitch matters because the streamers have already proven they'll spend money on vertical experiments, but they tend to bolt it onto existing workflows and call it a day. If Vurt is just another middleware layer, it'll get absorbed. If it's a genuine attempt to define the rules of the form, it could be the thing that forces HBO Max and Disney to stop half-measuring.
My honest take is that the genre argument wins, but only if someone demonstrates it with work that couldn't exist horizontally. Until I see that, I'll stay cautiously interested.