Google upgrades Veo 3 with price cuts and 1080p vertical video

Vertical video rules the internet, but most frontier video AI models have treated mobile screens like an afterthought. Cropping a cinematic widescreen shot into a TikTok frame usually leaves you with cut-off subjects and wasted compute.

Google just rolled out a major update to Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast in the Gemini API. The models now natively support vertical 9:16 generation, step up output quality to 1080p HD, and come with across-the-board price cuts.

Crucially, Google designated both Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast as stable and production-ready, meaning developers can now wire them directly into high-scale applications.

Built for mobile feeds

Getting a vertical video out of Veo no longer requires tricky post-processing workflows. Developers can simply pass the aspectRatio parameter as 9:16 to get native vertical outputs tailored for mobile apps and social feeds.

Resolution gets a bump too. A quick tweak to the resolution parameter pushes generated clips from standard definition up to 1080p HD.

Google also slashed pricing across the board. In one of its official sample prompts, Google even cheekily had a climber announce that Veo 3 is roughly half the price now. While exact savings vary by configuration, the goal is unmistakable: make high-volume video generation financially viable.

To showcase what is possible, Google dropped MediaSim in Google AI Studio. It hooks the tldraw infinite canvas SDK into Gemini for multimodal reasoning and image editing, then feeds those outputs into Veo 3 for automated video and audio creation.

All generated outputs will continue to carry Google's imperceptible SynthID digital watermark for provenance.

Why it matters

If you build social media automation, marketing tools, or mobile-first consumer apps, this is worth testing immediately. Native 9:16 framing paired with 1080p output removes the friction of cropping widescreen assets, while the cheaper pricing significantly lowers the risk of running automated pipelines at scale.

For the AI landscape, the video race is moving beyond eye-candy tech demos and into raw API pragmatism. Most video generators are still competing on cinematic horizontal clips, but the actual money and daily traffic live in vertical feeds. Google is leveraging its Gemini infrastructure to undercut rivals on price and meet mobile developers where their users actually are.

We think this is a smart, calculated pivot toward enterprise and developer adoption. Instead of chasing marginally better photorealism in isolated clips, Google is tackling the three biggest complaints developers have: cost, wrong aspect ratios, and production stability.

The real test will be consistency. A cheaper 1080p vertical video is great on paper, but if dynamic motion still causes occasional temporal warping or physical glitches, creators will still hesitate to push outputs straight to live social channels without manual review.