Samsung TV / lifestyle / SHORTFLIX
REVIEW
Shortflix brings the vertical-video scroll to a Samsung TV that doesn't really want it.
A free short-form video channel on Tizen from a small Indian studio, aimed at the TikTok-on-TV moment but landing on a screen shape the format was never designed for.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Shortflix
VAIBHAV VISUALS INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED
OUR SCORE
6.2
SAMSUNG TV
★ —
PRICE
Free
Shortflix arrived on the Samsung Tizen store in March 2026 as a free Lifestyle-category channel from Vaibhav Visuals India Private Limited, a smaller studio with no significant prior TV-app footprint. The name signals the angle plainly enough — short-form video, in the vertical-feed style that phones normalised over the past five years, ported to the largest screen in the house.
The Tizen listing is sparse. No public rating, no review count, no screenshots, no long-form description. That’s not unusual for a fresh free channel from outside the streaming majors, but it does mean a viewer is essentially launching the app blind. What’s verifiable from the store data alone is the shape of the product: free, vertical-video, India-based publisher, refreshed once in mid-April.
The harder question is whether short-form video belongs on a TV at all. Vertical 9:16 clips on a 65-inch horizontal panel waste most of the glass, and no channel — YouTube Shorts included — has cracked that geometry in 2026. Shortflix is a reasonable, low-cost shot at the format on Samsung’s platform. It is unlikely to be the one that solves it.
Shortflix is the short-form scroll transplanted to a horizontal panel — the playback works, the screen shape doesn't.
FEATURES
Shortflix is a free Tizen channel published by Vaibhav Visuals India Private Limited, listed under Samsung's Lifestyle category. It launched on the Samsung TV store on 23 March 2026 and was last refreshed on 15 April 2026 — a young app, with no rating or review-count data exposed on Tizen yet.
The product is short-form vertical video for the television. Users sit on the couch and advance through a feed of bite-size clips using the Samsung remote's directional pad, the same gesture grammar that every Tizen video channel inherits. There is no subscription tier visible on the store listing and no in-app-purchase flag set — Shortflix is offered free, presumably ad-supported, in the manner most fresh free Tizen channels are.
Beyond that, public Tizen metadata is thin. The store listing carries no screenshots, no long description, and no featured banner — typical for a new Lifestyle-category channel from a smaller studio. What's verifiable: free, recent, vertical-video, India-based publisher. The rest a viewer learns by launching it.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The pitch makes sense on paper. TikTok-style scrolling has reshaped how a generation watches short video, and the obvious next surface is the living-room TV. Putting a short-form feed on a Samsung remote — D-pad up for next clip, D-pad down for previous — is a reasonable port of a phone gesture to a TV gesture, and a small studio willing to ship the channel for free on Tizen in 2026 is doing the kind of platform-fill work that keeps Samsung's app store from looking entirely like Netflix-and-Disney-Plus.
Free and lightweight is the right shape for this category. Nobody is going to pay a subscription for unknown-creator vertical clips on their TV, and Shortflix doesn't ask them to.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The format is the structural problem, and it isn't Shortflix's fault alone. Vertical 9:16 video on a 65-inch horizontal panel wastes roughly two-thirds of the screen — black bars on both sides, a tall narrow window in the middle. Every short-form-on-TV experiment in 2024-2026 has run into the same wall, and none have solved it. YouTube Shorts on Tizen has the same issue; Shortflix inherits it.
Discovery is the other open question. With no public rating, no review count, no editorial coverage, and no listed screenshots on the Tizen store, a Samsung TV owner who isn't already looking for this channel has no way to know it exists. New free channels from small publishers tend to launch and sit — without a feature placement from Samsung or a paid promotion, install numbers stay low. The catalogue itself isn't publicly described, so a viewer can't tell from the listing whether the clips are licensed shorts, user-generated content, or studio-produced.
CONCLUSION
Shortflix is worth a launch if you specifically want short-form vertical video on your TV and don't already have YouTube Shorts open. It's free, it's a fresh build from a small studio, and the install cost is nothing. Most Samsung TV owners will not need it — the format-versus-screen-shape mismatch hasn't been solved by any short-form-on-TV channel yet, and a smaller publisher is unlikely to crack it first. Watch for whether the catalogue and discovery story sharpen as the channel ages past its March 2026 launch.