Zee5 has teamed up with Google Cloud to launch Clips, an AI-powered vertical short-video experience built to change how people discover long-form entertainment. The feature automatically identifies high-engagement moments from existing films and shows and turns them into swipeable vertical videos.
How Clips works
Clips combines several Google Cloud tools—including Gemini Pro, the Chirp multilingual model, Cloud Vision API and deep-learning models for image processing—to process long-form content at scale. A viewer sees a steady stream of short vertical moments. If a clip lands, the natural next step is to jump straight into the full-length title.
- Scan: AI models find moments inside long-form content that are likely to hold attention.
- Clip: Those moments are converted into vertical short videos automatically.
- Swipe: Viewers sample clips and can move directly into full-length viewing.
Zee5 says it has generated 13,000 clips from 1,200 titles so far. Early viewing behaviour is already showing movement from Clips into full-length content, the company notes.
Why this matters for streaming
OTT platforms often have the opposite problem from new creators: there is too much to watch, and audiences struggle to choose. Clips reframes short-form video as a discovery layer instead of a rival format. A vertical sample becomes a shop window for a full-length film or a multi-episode series.
The strategic view
Tejkarran Singh Bajaj, Business Head – Zee5 India and AI & Innovation, said the team is “looking at content consumption differently.” The real unlock, he said, is the ability to turn “thousands of hours of existing content into fresh entry points, at scale, using AI.”
Pramod Prakash, Chief Technology Officer at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, added that Clips was built around a simple audience need: making it easier to discover stories viewers may not have actively searched for. Amit Kumar, Managing Director, Digital Natives Business at Google Cloud India, said the collaboration shows generative AI can “drive measurable business value at scale.”
What marketers can do with the idea
The same principle applies far beyond OTT. Brands already sit on hours of long-form video—webinars, podcasts, event sessions, product demos and interviews—that get used once and then disappear. AI-assisted repurposing can find the highest-engagement segments, cut them for vertical feeds and turn each clip into a path back to the full asset.
The critical metric is not how many people watch a clip; it is how many move from the clip into deeper viewing. If the transition is not one tap, the funnel breaks. If the moments are chosen poorly, the swipe feed becomes wallpaper.
Source: MediaNews4U
