Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, Vanity Fair examines the rise of vertical video, brands + creator partnerships redefined our editor Scott Brown shares his presentation from Creator Beach in Cannes.

But First-

We really are at a crossroads, aren’t we?

Cannes Lions was an incredible experience. If they continue doubling down on becoming a home for the creator economy, I’d recommend anyone interested in this space make the trip next year.

There’s something about gathering so many people from traditional media, digital platforms, brands, creators, and investors in one place that gives you a clearer view of where digitally native storytelling is headed. Verticals are an increasingly important part of that conversation, but they’re no longer the whole conversation.

Across dozens of meetings, I noticed a consistent feeling. There was optimism - real optimism - but also uncertainty. It wasn’t the uncertainty of people wondering whether verticals are a fad. Quite the opposite. Most people I spoke with seemed increasingly convinced they’re becoming a permanent part of the entertainment landscape.

The uncertainty is about how to fully address the sector from a business perspective.

We can all see that major vertical platforms are generating meaningful revenue. What we still don’t have are enough clear, repeatable examples of outside investors, producers, and studios putting money into a title or slate and generating exceptional returns. Every emerging medium eventually reaches the moment where the economics become undeniable. Verticals haven’t quite had that moment yet.

I don’t think we’re very far away.

One reason is distribution. TikTok’s deeper move into serialized storytelling may prove to be one of the most important developments the industry has seen. It shifts some power away from closed ecosystems deciding what audiences watch and toward an algorithm that rewards genuine audience engagement. The algorithm isn’t perfect, but it is far more meritocratic than traditional gatekeeping. As communities rally around great stories, quality has a better chance to win.

The other reason is something I discussed during my Cannes presentation, which you’ll find in full at the end of this week’s newsletter.

We’re beginning to see evidence that investing in better storytelling produces better business results.

As part of my talk at Cannes, I asked several companies that have deliberately bet on higher-quality programming whether they’d be willing to share any data supporting that belief. A few generously offered snapshots.

What excites me most is that these are still early signals.

More outside investors are entering the market. (Some unannounced ones that are even more interesting are coming too) More experienced producers are bringing ambitious projects into the space. New distribution opportunities are emerging beyond the dedicated vertical apps. Some of those bets are going to work.

And when that happens that uncertainty will give way to something new. It’s still early, barely three years in a lot of ways. Let’s keep it going, one story at a time.

Going Up? The (Continued) Rise of Vertical Video — Vanity Fair Vanity Fair examines vertical video’s leap from social-media novelty to a mainstream viewing habit — a useful mainstream temperature check for anyone still convincing skeptical executives or brand partners that microdramas aren’t a passing trend.

The 4 Types of Creator Partners — The Publish Press A post-Cannes breakdown of how brands now deploy creators as distribution, talent, directors, and consultants. Where brands are moving from sponsoring vertical series to becoming characters inside them.

More Romance Novels Than Ever Being Adapted For Streaming, Research Finds — Deadline New Ampere research finds 83% of first-run romance commissions are now scripted book adaptations, not reality dating shows — the same BookTok-fueled pipeline reshaping streaming that’s also driving demand for microdrama’s romance-heavy catalog.

The Great Studio Transformation: AI, Innovation and the New Business of Film — NAB Show NAB Show’s recap of Hollywood’s AI-and-IP pivot opens with microdramas, quoting former NBCUniversal chair Susan Rovner calling vertical series a rare growth pocket while the traditional studio business contracts around it.

Game of Choice

Platform: TallFlix

Logline: After a fierce argument separates single mother Eve from her rebellious daughter Vicky, Vicky disappears, forcing Eve into Eden Island, a deadly competition where contestants must fight to save the people they love.

Genre: Psychological Action Thriller / Survival / Family Drama

This 65-episode TallFlix series Game of Choice keeps the emotional language of microdrama, leaning into heightened performances, family conflict, and unabashed melodrama. Once the characters enter the killing game, that intensity feels entirely at home, proving that genres other than soapy-romance can feel “right” in this format as well. The circumstances really are that extreme, so the tears, rage, fear, and enormous emotional swings become believable within the world.

The series then brings in its legacy elements through craft. Qianyu David Zhang’s cinematography uses dollies, cranes, and tracking shots to create a rare sense of scale and movement for the format. The lighting and color grade embrace shadows and atmosphere without sacrificing saturation or clarity on a small screen. Highly ambitious and well-executed stunt work adds another layer of scope. The cast completes the combination: Jackson Tiller brings remarkable emotional truth to a brief role, while Felix Merback makes Lafayette’s theatricality feel unpredictable, entertaining, and genuinely frightening.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Editor’s Note: This is the presentation I gave last week in Cannes. The panel with Hannah Stocking and Sasha Tkcachenko of Holywater dove into the vertical world, but I realized as I built it, and as I spoke to so many people on the Croisette, that more than ever, the conversation must be about the larger explosion of digitally native scripted content.

Here we go!

Hi everyone, and thanks for being here. In a few minutes I’m going to bring out two close collaborators, Hannah Stocking and Sasha Tchachenko, and we’re going to talk about the Microdrama Boom, and what it signals about the future for creators, platforms, brands, and really anyone with a story they want to tell and an audience they want to reach.

But before we do that, I’d like to provide a little history of what got us here.

I’d like to tell you a story.

Because I’ve spent most of my professional life searching for something.

A little about me. Hi, I’m Scott Brown. I’m the Founder of Second Rodeo Productions, and for almost twenty years I’ve worked at the intersection of traditional media and what we now call the creator economy.

Starting in 2012 I directed more than 700 episodes of Larry King’s return to Hulu.

In 2016, I helped launch Dwayne Johnson’s YouTube channel and made a musical on YouTube with Lin-Manuel Miranda.

In 2023, I even crashed a train with MrBeast and helped create a video viewed more than 300 million times.

And through all of it, I was searching for something.

So what was I searching for?

You have to understand that I love scripted storytelling.

It’s why I got into media in the first place. I love films. I love television. The first things I ever made online were scripted web series. More than anything in my professional life, I wanted scripted entertainment to truly work on the internet. To become native to the home I had spent so much time in.

Not as a marketing campaign. Not because of a talented outlier. Not as a one-off success story.

I wanted a sustained audience desire to watch scripted content online. Stories made with actors and camera coverage and imagination. Stories supported by a sustainable business where creative people could thrive.

Every few years, a company would arrive and declare that digitally native scripted entertainment had finally arrived.

Sony Crackle.

YouTube Red.

Quibi.

And every time, I wanted it to be true.

But every time I looked at the audience behavior, every time I looked at the data, I came away with the same feeling.

My heart would sink and the data and the audience would tell me and the rest of the industry…

Not yet.

Then in February of 2024, a producer friend sent me an article about something called a short drama.

Today we call them microdramas.

And I followed the rabbit hole.

I read article after article, study after study.

But this time something was different.

My heart didn’t sink.

It flew.

Because this time, the audience was telling a different story.

And now, standing here at Cannes Lions, on the Croisette, I really believe I get to say something I’ve been waiting a very long time to say.

That thing I’ve been searching for?

I think I found it.

The article was about what we now call microdramas.

Now, what is a microdrama?

When people ask me that question, I usually ask another one.

What is a movie?

A movie is a collection of scenes that, when watched in their intended order, creates a sensation we call plot. People are willing to pay for plot.

Now imagine those scenes are about seventy-five seconds long. Imagine they are divided into chapters. Imagine they are designed for the phone and shot vertically.

That’s the beginning of a microdrama.

Microdramas are conflict-rich and plot-driven.

These are stories moving at the speed of Tik Tok

Audiences often discover them through social feeds and advertisements that lead to dedicated apps, though that is beginning to change.

And while the industry borrows some monetization strategies from mobile gaming, the thing really driving more than a billion dollars in annual revenue and hundreds of millions of views is something much simpler.

People simply want to know what happens next.

And they are willing to pay for it.

That is an opportunity.

So where are we now in this microdrama boom?

Many people describe today’s microdramas as soapy. Romance-driven. Full of cliffhangers.

Sometimes executed in ways that don’t resemble traditional television or film.

That observation is worth examining.

Because history loves to rhyme.

When television entered American homes, one of its first breakout formats was the soap opera.

Stories built to sell products.

They were enormously popular. Audiences were obsessed with them.

Cultural gatekeepers often dismissed them.

But that didn’t matter.

Because soap operas helped prove that television could become a legitimate storytelling medium.

And I think we are seeing something very similar today.

What’s fascinating is that in those early days, it would have been nearly impossible to predict that the same box bringing soap operas into people’s homes would one day bring The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and the World Cup.

Because the first successful format in a medium is rarely it’s strongest product

And I think that may be one of the mistakes some people make when evaluating microdramas today.

They look at the current version and assume it is the destination.

History suggests it may be the beginning.

When I think about the future, I don’t think we should only be talking about microdramas.

They are one exciting format inside something much larger.

An explosion of digitally native scripted formats.

Vertical and horizontal.

Short-form and long-form.

Formats and storytelling structures we haven’t even discovered yet.

Because a future filled with digitally native scripted entertainment will not belong exclusively to Hollywood.

And it won’t belong exclusively to creators either.

We are entering a period of rapid convergence.

Creators becoming studios.

Traditional storytellers getting closer to their audiences through digital platforms.

Platforms evolving.

Brands becoming participants in entertainment rather than merely sponsors of it.

New intellectual property.

New franchises.

New stars.

New business models.

The distance between the people making stories and the audiences consuming them gets smaller every year.

That is a good thing.

Personally, I think it’s a great thing.

I opened this talk by telling you that I have spent my professional life searching for something.

And that now, I believe I’ve found it.

Scripted storytelling is finally becoming native to the internet.

Microdramas are one of the clearest indicators that it’s true.

But after making microdramas of my own, after seeing audiences embrace them, and after having the privilege of working with people like Hannah Stocking, a Forbes Top 50 Creator and HOLYWATER, whom FOX recently invested in, I’m more convinced than ever that this isn’t really the story.

The story is what comes next.

Right now - A lot of people in film and television believe that what I’m describing is the beginning of the end.

But it isn’t.

It is the end of the beginning.

For art and commerce, and all the amazing things that emerge when they converge.

For anyone with a story they want to tell.

For anyone with an audience they want to reach.

The time is now.

I spent twenty years finding this moment.

And I hope I get to spend the next twenty finding out what it means.

Thank you.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Subscribe now

Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, Uber Eats steps into branded microdrama, we look at what unscripted reality can teach the format, and we finally make good on last week’s promise: tracing the line from the birth of television to the rise of vertical storytelling.

But first–

I’m wrapping up Cannes Lions with a lot to think about.

Wednesday’s panel was a real highlight. Thank you to everyone who came out, listened, and joined the conversation.

I’m heading home with plenty of new ideas about where this space is going, and I’m looking forward to unpacking them all in next week’s Vertical Bloom.

But for now, let’s get into it.

Blink49 and Uber Eats Build a Branded Vertical Mystery

Murder at the Mansion shows how established studios and major brands can use vertical storytelling to develop original IP together, with the sponsor built into the entertainment rather than placed around it.

Blackmagic Design Spotlights the Workflow Behind PLAYBACK

Blackmagic Design’s behind-the-scenes look shows how increasingly ambitious vertical productions can use connected camera and post-production tools to deliver cinematic scale on compressed schedules.

Instagram Takes Episodic Storytelling to the TV Screen

Instagram’s test of longform creator content, episodic series, and live programming on televisions signals that social platforms are no longer staying inside the feed, but bringing digitally native talent and storytelling directly into the living room.

Campus Confidential: Miami

Platform: Peacock (mobile app) / Bravo

Logline: In sun-soaked Miami, an elite group of students navigate friendships, romance, Greek life, and social media scandals… proving that behind every yacht party and perfect post lies a much messier reality.

Genre: Unscripted / Reality microdrama

Anyone who’s been on TikTok in the last two years knows that sorority content has its own gravitational pull. Rush recaps, drop day reactions, pledge reveals: The internet is clearly clamoring for this world, and Campus Confidential: Miami arrives knowing exactly that.

What works here is the format matching the material almost perfectly. Talking heads, the bread and butter of reality TV, translate to 9:16 better than almost any other shot type. You’re close, you’re in someone’s face, and the frame doesn’t feel compromised. The on-screen texts and social media overlays that might feel grafted-on when watched on a television feel completely natural watching on a phone.

Unscripted digital has been working for a long time, and traditional reality TV has actually absorbed a lot of the grammar of online content far more fluidly than scripted digital has.

I Think I’ve Seen This Film Before

Editor’s Note: Last week, we promised to go back to the birth of television. We tend to remember TV after it won, forgetting how much resistance, dismissal, and uncertainty surrounded it as a new format. This week, we look at that struggle and the path television took toward legitimacy, drawing a line to the pushback verticals and scripted digital face today. This is more than a trip down memory lane, it’s a reminder that the journey we are watching now has a history that it rhymes with.

That first quote is what the industry said about soap operas in 1932.

The second is from 1961, about television.

The third from 2026, about microdramas.

Irna Phillips’ Painted Dreams, widely considered the first soap opera, debuted on Chicago’s WGN on October 20, 1930. It ran in 15-minute installments, five days a week, built for housewives. The age-old story is that they were named “soap operas” because Procter & Gamble was the primary advertiser.

Short, frequent, emotionally direct, and shaped around an audience’s routine. Sound familiar?

Radio let broadcasters and advertisers test serialized storytelling before carrying it into television. Scripted digital is doing something similar now, with pilot mandates, giving studios, brands, and creators room to test before making a larger bet.

By 1937, 90% of their entire advertising budget went to daytime radio, and by 1939 they were producing 21 soap operas. Daytime soaps went on to generate $1.25 billion in annual advertising revenue across U.S. networks by 1984. P&G is now the biggest advertiser in the world. The soap opera is where they built that foundation.

Their core audience then: housewives. Women at home. A demographic the rest of the industry didn’t take seriously.

The core audience now: across Omdia, Media Partners Asia, and Real Reel, every major industry study lands in the same place. The core microdrama audience is women aged 25–55, with the paying demographic skewing toward affluent, urban women 30–60. On YouTube specifically, women 35–54 represent over 36% of microdrama streams despite accounting for just 19% of general viewing in those age groups.

In December 2025, P&G announced The Golden Pear Affair, 55-episode microdrama produced by P&G Studios. The company that invented the soap opera to reach women at home is now producing microdramas to reach women on their phones.

By 1953, Hollywood was panicking. And by Hollywood, we mean the movie theaters and cinema studios. These were companies whose entire business model depended on people paying to sit in a dark room together. They were watching that model bleed out in real time, because a small black-and-white box had shown up in living rooms across America.

Their response was to make movies more cinematic than ever. CinemaScope stretched the frame to 2.35:1. VistaVision added vertical resolution. 3D put the picture in your face. Technicolor made everything vivid and lush. All of it designed to give audiences something the little box couldn’t replicate.

The condescension was overt. Television was low quality. Television was cheap. Television was for people who couldn’t be bothered to get off the couch. The studios were loud about this attitude. A few decades later, they had to swallow it whole.

Some studios are learning from that lesson. In October 2025, Fox Entertainment took an equity stake in Holywater and committed to 200+ vertical titles over two years, including recutting Season 3 of Farmer Wants a Wife into 101 episodes for a “mobile-first binge experiment.”

“Innovation in digital storytelling is shaping the future of entertainment.” Rob Wade, CEO of Fox Entertainment

This is the same move as studios selling their back catalogs to TV networks in the 1950s.

And here’s what the studios missed the first time: the technology always catches up. The black-and-white box got color. Then HD. Then 4K. You can fight the format. You cannot fight the inevitability of better technology.

By 1960, 87% of American homes had a television set. Families were watching six hours a day. The format the cinema industry had dismissed as a lesser medium had become the dominant one. Not because it won a war of words, but because the audience simply chose it.

The GI Bill (1944) gave millions of veterans low-interest home loans with no down payment required. By 1945 there was a shortage of five million homes nationwide. Between 1947 and 1953, 83% of all U.S. population growth occurred in suburban places, miles from the movie palaces families had once walked to. For many of those families, television wasn’t the convenient option: it was the solution. Once enough families had one, gravity did the rest.

That logic has a 2026 version. Post-pandemic inflation hit entertainment spending hard. A movie for two is $40 before concessions. Ninety-one percent of American adults own a smartphone. Deloitte found that 39% of consumers had canceled at least one paid streaming service within six months. The phone is already in everyone’s pocket and the first ten episodes of most microdramas are free before any paywall kicks in. Entirely free scripted digital (Brooklyn Coffee Shop, The Group Chat) already have real audiences. When entertainment is accessible, audiences come.

This is not ancient history. It is a pattern.

The Dismissal Is Always the Tell

In May 1961, by which point 55 million television sets were in American homes, FCC Chairman Newton Minow stood before the National Association of Broadcasters and called television a “vast wasteland.” There were 55 million television sets in American homes at that moment. The format was already winning, but the institution declared it culturally lesser anyway.

In January 2026, TechCrunch predicted that microdramas would generate billions while announcing that they “kind of suck.” Omdia estimates the global market reached $11 billion in 2025. The criticism may fairly describe some of a rapidly expanding market. The format is already winning. The institution is declaring it lesser anyway.

This is the tell. The dismissal doesn’t arrive when a format is struggling. It arrives at peak institutional discomfort.

The Format Always Raises Its Own Ceiling

Skeptics of television pointed to the quality of the content. Fair point, for a while. Then HBO launched in 1972: paid television, ostensibly better than free TV, but still TV. Nobody quite knew what it was yet or how to talk about it. Vertical is in a similar period of business model ambiguity, experimenting with coin unlocks, ad-supported, subscriptions, free-with-discovery.

Then, on January 10, 1999, The Sopranos premiered.

Fewer than four million viewers watched night one. Within three seasons, that number was 13.4 million for a season premiere. The 2005 syndication deal: nearly $200 million (the highest ever paid for a cable drama at the time). People still watch The Sopranos for the first time every week, twenty-five years later.

HBO’s tagline during this period was “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” They were trying to escape the stigma of their own medium. And The Sopranos made that escape permanent. Television didn’t improve because critics changed their minds. It improved because a format accessible to enormous audiences eventually attracted the people who knew how to use it.

The Legitimacy Avalanche Has Already Started

February 1, 2013: Netflix drops all 13 episodes of House of Cards at once. David Fincher directing. A-list cast attached. CBS chief Les Moonves called Ted Sarandos personally: “Do you know how television works? You give them one at a time.”

Netflix’s stock went from under $60 to over $400 that year. House of Cards became the first streaming original to receive Emmy nominations. Legitimacy, overnight.

We are watching that happen again.

Issa Rae, creator of Insecure, one of the most commercially credible names in American television, partnered with TikTok to produce Screen Time as a vertical series. 75 million views in the first week. 150 million in the first month. Fox Entertainment has taken an equity stake in Holywater, committing to 200+ vertical video titles. Major talent is moving into this format. This is what it looks like right before the credibility avalanche.

This Time, the Window Is Shorter

Television’s legitimacy took thirty years to arrive. Cable took another twenty. Netflix’s moment took six years from launch to House of Cards.

In China alone, microdrama revenue grew from about $500 million in 2021 to $7 billion in 2024.

Three years.

This is not linear progression. Each cycle is compressing. Technology no longer moves at the pace of industries. The window between early and too late is narrowing faster than any previous chapter of this story.

The cinema studios that dismissed television in 1953 eventually adapted. But the ones who moved first rewrote the industry. The networks that dismissed cable eventually caught up, but HBO’s head start was undeniable.

The audience doesn’t wait for permission. It never has. The phone is already in every pocket. The content is already finding its viewers. The legitimate names are already arriving.

History doesn’t repeat. But it sure does love to rhyme.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

Give us a sub if you don’t want to miss anything! See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Subscribe now

Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, major brands turn verticals into a shopping engine, creator-led scripted IP makes strides, and the man who saw podcasts early thinks about the future of verticals.

But first–

I’m writing this from a brasserie in Paris, searching for a few more words…

And tomorrow we’ll be making our way towards Cannes Lions. The Festival of Creativity. I get the feeling from those that went last year that it’s going to be quite the event. The creator economy continues to evolve.

On Wednesday I’ll be sharing the stage with some recent collaborators and reflecting on where this vertical space has been, and where it’s headed.

But as I myself head toward Cannes I can’t help but continue contextualizing all of this in the broader evolution of entertainment, of the creator economy, of digital media, but also that of technology and culture. It’s all careening together towards something we’ve never seen. The words to describe this undiscovered future are the words I’m seeking here next to the côte de bœuf and the tiled ceilings.

What I’ll share on stage is ostensibly about vertical storytelling. The ideas behind it are much bigger. The future it points to even larger than that.

Maybe I should find all of this uncertainty unsettling. Instead, I find it energizing. Because while I cannot describe the hard contours of the shape our collective future in entertainment is yet to take, I have more certainty than ever that within it will be the beating heart of story, and the ever-present texture of the human experience.

And some dank memes too.

Tonight though, I’m going to keep searching for the last words I need for this presentation at Cannes Lions. If all goes well, I’ll share the talk itself here next week.

If you’re in Cannes, join me Wednesday at 3:30 on the Creator Stage, and if you’re not there, I’ll share it here not too long after.

I hope some people think I’m right, I hope some people think I’m wrong, I hope we all end up talking about it fiercely on the Croisette.

But for now, let’s get into it.

Fox Plans to Keep Tubi and The Roku Channel Separate

Fox has bet big on verticals via some key investments, and this signals it’s move into streaming. As more verticals preserve the horizontal frame we’re interested to see how Tubi becomes a player, and where Roku fits in.

Target and Bravo Turn Fandom Into a Shoppable Digital Series

Shop What Happens points to a future where vertical and mobile-first entertainment are not just marketing extensions, but commerce engines built around fandom, talent, and real-time purchase behavior.

Silk White Builds a Hollywood-Free Hit Machine

Silk White’s success outside the traditional studio system is another reminder that underserved audiences, low-cost production, and FAST platforms can create real businesses without waiting for Hollywood permission.

Graviteur Studios Bets on Creator-Led Scripted IP

The team behind this venture represent some longstanding minds within the digital space, and this bet around scripted IP is another signal towards the market’s confidence in digitally-native scripted formats.

To Her Beat

Platform: Chera TV

Logline: Set against sweat-soaked studios, neon-lit warehouses, and early-2000s dance culture, To Her Beat is a coming-of-age love story about finding your voice, choosing your people, and dancing like your life depends on it.

Genre: Coming-of-age romance / dance drama

To Her Beat announces itself differently from the first frame. The color grade is particularly distinct compared to what you’re used to seeing in vertical: no overlit faces engineered to pop on an auto-playing feed. It’s moodier than that, more textured. Paired with a needledrop opening track, the show reads as something that has a strong point of view.

The writing leans naturalistic, and the cast handles it deftly. This medium is typically loud about the overtones but these deliveries were much richer in subtext.

There’s craft in the camera and post work too. A shot inside a fridge and jump cuts that lean into the digital grammar of the format paired with cinematic tracking shots that nod toward contemporary TV. The sound design feels equally deliberate. There are sequences carried entirely on SFX and dialogue.

In a format where music is often used as a constant emotional prop to hold retention, that’s a risk. But the most interesting gamble is the dance sequences. Conventional wisdom in vertical says stay tight, keep cutting, don’t linger: the format rewards speed and escalation. To Her Beat has moments of breath early to establish the motif of full dance sequences. I for one enjoyed them.

Chera TV built its identity around the idea that the vertical format deserves the same creative rigor as anything else. To Her Beat is a wonderful one-two step in that direction.

What the Vertical Media Summit Told Us

Editor’s note: Hernan Lopez recently published a piece in his Streaminomics newsletter summarizing insights from the Vertical Media Summit: a closed-door gathering of senior leaders across the industry. Scott was in attendance but we’re only sharing info that’s available in the free, public edition of this recap. Hernan notes that clients receive a version with deeper analysis and proprietary Owl & Co research one day in advance. If you work for an Owl & Co client, or would like to become one, reply to Hernan directly.

Vertical is real because people are arguing about it like it is real.

“Vertical storytelling is a phase”

“The quality isn’t there”

“Real audiences aren’t watching.”

There is a version of this conversation that keeps coming back. The tone is usually skeptical, sometimes dismissive and the arguments aren’t new. But the fact that it keeps needing to be made is, we’d argue, exactly the point.

Hernan Lopez has heard this before. He’s the founder of Wondery, which he built into the world’s largest independent podcast publisher before Amazon acquired it. He was one of the earliest voices making the case that podcasting was a serious storytelling medium, long before the industry agreed. He was right about that. He is now paying close attention to vertical.

His piece on the Vertical Media Summit frames the pushback not as a warning sign, but as a familiar one. A format that keeps threatening something keeps generating resistance. The persistence of that resistance is its own form of proof. Vertical has been generating that for a while now. Dismissal can sound an awful lot like disruption if you listen close enough.

It’s also worth noting who was in the room. Netflix. Amazon. HBO. Companies that rewrote the rules of their respective industries because they saw a shift coming and moved toward it early. They’ve done this before. That they are actively interrogating vertical now is not a coincidence. It is a pattern.

Their presence does not prove exactly where vertical is headed. But it does make one thing harder to dismiss: the format is no longer sitting outside the serious media conversation. So the more useful move is to stop arguing over whether vertical matters and start looking closely at where the category is actually taking shape.

We’ll connect more of those dots next week. A short history of television’s first years, how the industry positioned it against cinema, and why the arc from movie theater to living room to pocket feels less like coincidence and more like inevitability.

But here’s what to pay attention to in the meantime:

The first thing to watch is the nomenclature. The vocabulary of this medium is still being written. Microdramas get most of the attention because they’re the format most comparable to traditional TV. But they’re one rib of a much larger umbrella. Hernan points out what we’ve been feeling for a while: vertical is as broad a category as television itself and the grammar and definitions are still being found and defined.

Something we’ve been calling a format might turn out to be a genre. Something we called a genre might be a secret third thing. (We once referred to Playback internally as a vertical motion picture because that’s what it felt like to us.) There is already a push to retire “microdrama” in favor of “microseries,” or simply “vertical.” Not all of them are dramas.The language is still catching up to the work.

The second thing to watch is viewing context because it both literally and figuratively frames the content. He offers a useful system: four distinct contexts for where people are watching vertical.

• Vertical native apps: Dedicated platforms built specifically for this format. Think ReelShort, DramaBox, CandyJar.

• Media super apps: Large platforms where vertical lives alongside everything else. Think TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts.

• Streamers, free and premium: Traditional streaming platforms now licensing or producing vertical content. Think Peacock, Netflix.

• News: Vertical-formatted journalism and nonfiction content. The most underreported category in the conversation.

Where people watch tells you just as much about the vibe of the content (and the viewers themselves!) as genre does. Each vehicle is building it’s own subset of audience expectations.

Then there’s AI filmmaking. The third thing to watch is that vertical is the clearest test case for it right now. There are essentially no fully AI-generated feature films or traditional series in wide commercial release. In vertical, the picture is completely different. AI-generated microseries already exist and already have audiences. (Though maybe not the same as the audiences that watch man-made microseries. Check out this edition of the bloom for our thoughts on that).

The reason is structural: when your budget is tight and your turnaround is fast, AI isn’t a luxury, it’s a production reality. The gap between what you can make with and without it is enormous at smaller budgets. It can change what a show is capable of being, not just how efficiently you make it. On a currently typical vertical series (small-budget with tight timelines), it can change the scope, speed, visual ambition, and even the genres that become producible.

The final thing to watch is timing. The big question of course is if and when to enter this space. Hernan names some instructive fads (3D movies, the metaverse, virtual reality) to illustrate how difficult it is to distinguish a trend from a technology looking for a use case. It’s hard to tell what the tipping point is. But, like with any good disrupter, those who are waiting to see it before they believe it will likely be too late.

Scott has said something to our team more than once since attending the summit, which was echoed to me when I read Mary Ann Halford’s closing remarks: the energy in that room was specific. Something more visceral than cautious optimism. A room full of people who have watched cycles come and go, genuinely excited about where this format is headed.

The energy around vertical right now does not prove the future. But it does show that serious people are no longer laughing it off. They are paying attention, testing the edges, and trying to understand the rules as they’re writing them.

That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microseries and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week, Netflix makes vertical moves, Us vs Pizza Guys vs Vampires, and we go on a deep dive into why digitally native scripted formats are finally taking off.

But first–

I’ve been thinking a lot about Disneyland lately.

As our team continues to work across YouTube, vertical storytelling, and more traditional corners of entertainment, I’ve found myself paying closer attention to the way audiences move between platforms.

Whether we’re helping a vertical app expand its YouTube presence (more on this soon), creating original scripted content for the various platforms (Horizontal and Vertical), or sitting in meetings with both legacy media and digitally native creators, I keep hearing conversations framed around funnels.

How do we get people in? How do we move them through? How do we maximize value? Working at the intersection of art and commerce, I understand the impulse.

But I wonder if a better metaphor is a theme park.

When I think about the revolution happening around vertical content, I’ve never seen it as a revolution around a single format. I’ve always seen it as part of the much larger digital scripted boom that has been building for years.

Every format represents a different storytelling experience. What if microseries are one attraction in the park? What if YouTube longform is another? What if serialized formats like Brooklyn Coffee Shop and The Ick are another?

And what about the formats that haven’t been invented yet? The ones quietly finding audiences in corners of the internet right now. The storytellers getting excited because something no one has ever seen before just crossed 10,000 views for the first time.

The most exciting part of this moment isn’t any individual format. It’s the ecosystem. Because the best theme parks don’t just create attractions.

They create communities.

Communities that gather in Discord servers and Reddit threads. Communities that share stories with friends and eagerly await what’s coming next.

As storytellers operating at the intersection of art and commerce, I hope we spend a little less time thinking about funnels and a little more time thinking about theme parks.

Not just how we attract audiences.

But how we create places they love, and look forward to revisiting time and time again.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Netflix Orders Minimum Wage From American High Shorts Team

Netflix has ordered Minimum Wage, a 28-episode workplace comedy based on the viral American High Shorts universe. Netflix is pulling from an existing digital audience and folding that rhythm into its own ecosystem. This feels like a clear sign that major streamers are starting to absorb digital’s pacing, audience behavior, and talent pipelines.

Idilio Raises $5.5M Seed Round with Katzenberg’s help

Katzenberg has repeatedly put capital behind new storytelling formats, from Quibi’s $1B NewTV raise in 2018 to more recent WndrCo bets in AI video and entertainment technology. Idilio suggests he is still circling the same question: what does mobile-first entertainment become when the market is finally ready for it?

The Kansas City Chiefs Launch a Microdrama

The Kansas City Chiefs are launching El Offseason, a nine-episode Spanish-language scripted comedy that blends sketch comedy with telenovela storytelling. The series follows fictional team employees whose offseason spirals into romance, rivalry, and chaos once football stops. The Chiefs are targeting fans across Mexico, Spain, and the U.S., with Mexico and Spain sitting inside the team’s NFL Global Markets Program rights. By blending sketch comedy with telenovela storytelling, the team is giving Spanish-speaking audiences an easy entertainment-first entry point into Chiefs fandom.

VertiCast Launches For Vertical Casting

VertiCast, a casting app built specifically for vertical microseries, has launched on iPhone, with Android expected to follow. The app lets actors create profiles with vertical clips while producers and casting teams swipe, shortlist, and message talent directly. Casting is so important, curious how this effects the process…

Pizza Guys vs Vampires

Platform: inverted.film

Logline: On their first night delivering pizzas, two coworkers stumble into a vampire conspiracy and have to fight their way through one very strange shift.

Genre: Action-Comedy / Horror-Comedy / Buddy Comedy

Pizza Guys vs Vampires is a refreshing watch because it feels built for vertical without feeling trapped by vertical. The series gets into the action quickly, using punchy edits, quick pushes, and strong visual rhythm to keep the pace of a traditional microseries, while still bringing an indie genre sensibility that feels specific and intentional.

The writing is also a major strength. It feels human, current, and clearly written in the language it was filmed in, with a self-referential sense of humor that gives the show a little Scott Pilgrim-style camp without breaking the story. What stands out most is how much thought went into the form itself: split screens are used to fill the 9:16 frame, the comedy keeps moving, and the costumes, makeup, and SFX all support the action-horror tone instead of feeling ornamental.

That balance may come from Dominic Russo’s role as director, producer, and story credit on the series. As a co-creator and executive producer of Workaholics, which grew out of online comedy before becoming a Comedy Central series, Russo clearly understands both traditional filmmaking and the keys of digital.

The takeaway is simple: vertical can handle real genre experimentation when the creative team knows how to honor the format without lowering the creative ceiling.

Why Is Scripted Digital Working Now?

Editor’s note: We’ve been cooking on this coverage for a while, and Franziska Harms went deep. Sometimes I think to trim things at this length, but honestly it’s so thorough I think it’s worth the read. Still, TLDR;

For years, scripted digital had a reputation problem.

It was either treated like a silly guilty pleasure hobby, a marketing add-on, or a place where traditional talent went when the “real” thing did not work out. Quibi is the obvious cautionary tale: big money, big names, mobile-first ambition, and a shutdown only months after launch. But Quibi’s failure did not prove audiences did not want short-form scripted. It proved that Hollywood could not simply shrink television, put it on a phone, and assume the audience would follow.

Part of what changed was the audience. Audiences are more fluent in digital storytelling than they used to be. The habits that once felt specific to very online viewers have spread across a much wider population, as phones, social platforms, and short-form video have become part of everyday media consumption. For younger audiences especially, that language is not an adjustment. It is often the storytelling environment they already know best.

The pace of digital storytelling no longer feels overwhelming to most viewers. It feels normal. The same retention language that once seemed native only to YouTube, TikTok, and creator content is now part of the broader viewing grammar. Quick pushes, rapid setup, compressed conflict, clear hooks, and emotional payoff are not tricks anymore. They are expectations. The appetite for content that moves at digital speed has caught up to the platforms it lives on.

Technology has also become more universal. More people have now grown up inside internet culture, then those simply adjacent to it. In the U.S., Pew found that 95% of teens have access to a smartphone and 96% use the internet daily, while nearly half say they are online almost constantly. TU estimated that 5.5 billion people were online in 2024, representing 68% of the world’s population, while its 2025 edition says almost three-quarters of the world is now online. Compare that to about 10 years ago: global internet use went from nearly 3B people in 2014, about 40% of the world, to 74% today.

The rhythms, references, editing patterns, and emotional shorthand of digital are no longer niche. They are mainstream. That changes what scripted work can feel like on a phone. A microseries does not have to apologize for being fast for example. It just has to be good at being fast.

The bigger shift is cultural. Digital is now mature enough to be taken seriously as both a business and a creative ecosystem. The numbers became impossible to ignore first. The creator economy is now projected to approach half a trillion dollars by 2027, and YouTube alone says its creative ecosystem contributed more than $55 billion to U.S. GDP in 2024 while supporting the equivalent of 490,000 full-time jobs. At a certain point, what looked like a side door became a real industry.

But money is only part of the story.

Digital has also earned status with the next generation. In 2019, a LEGO/Harris Poll survey found that children in the U.S. and U.K. were three times more likely to say they wanted to be YouTubers than astronauts. More recent Gen Alpha reporting points in the same direction, with YouTuber and TikTok creator sitting near the top of dream-job lists. That matters. For a long time, digital was framed as the place you went if you could not break into film or television. For younger audiences and younger creators,and therefore modern culture, it is increasingly the cooler place to start.

That does not mean the path is easy. Most creators still do not make a full-time living online, and acting remains a brutally unstable profession. But the internet has changed the odds of being seen. The barrier to entry is low, which means the range of quality is enormous. Anyone can upload. Anyone can try. That can make the space noisy, but it also makes it democratic. In the largest sea of fish, standing out becomes the skill. For filmmakers, performers, writers, editors, and producers, that has opened a more realistic early-career path than waiting for permission from the traditional gatekeepers.

It has also changed what a “break” can look like. Issa Rae built from Awkward Black Girl into Insecure. Quinta Brunson went from self-produced internet comedy and BuzzFeed videos to Abbott Elementary. Rachel Sennott used online comedy as part of her path into Shiva Baby and Bottoms. Workaholics grew out of a web-comedy ecosystem before becoming a Comedy Central series. These are not exceptions that disprove the system. They are signals that the system itself has changed.

This may be why scripted digital is starting to work in a way it did not before. Audiences seem more fluent in the pace and structure of digital storytelling. The tools to enter the space are more accessible than they have ever been. The business has become large enough to take seriously. And culturally, digital may be reaching a point where it no longer has to borrow all of its legitimacy from film and television.

Television went through a version of this. For years, film was treated as the serious medium, while television was seen as smaller, faster, and less artistic. That hierarchy did not collapse overnight. It changed because the work got better, the audience grew, and the industry slowly learned how to judge television on its own terms.

Digital may now be moving through a similar transition. Microseries seem to be working when audiences experience digital pace not as a downgrade, but as its own storytelling language. And the creators who understand that language are not simply getting lucky. At their best, they are using craft, instinct, performance, editing, and audience understanding in ways the traditional industry is beginning to recognize more seriously.

That should be exciting, not threatening. Legacy film and television still bring extraordinary discipline, taste, talent, and infrastructure to the table. Digital brings speed, feedback, access, and a deep understanding of how audiences behave now. The opportunity may not be choosing one over the other. It may be finding out what happens when both sides take each other seriously.

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That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—scripted content in the mobile age.

This week: America gets its first major microdrama festival, we consider Issa Rae’s Screen Time, and we ask the community how AI is actually affecting them.

But first–

I just got back from Hernan Lopez’ really well done Vertical Media Summit and was pleasantly surprised by both the energy and the faces I saw there, familiar and new. There was something in the conversations, on stage and off, that felt different. A new shade of sophistication around this moment.

I want to spend a little more time reflecting on the experience, and we may talk about it more next week, but as I spoke to people throughout the day I came to a realization:

The tense of it all wasn’t “if.”

It was “how.”

How big does this become? How does the quality improve? How do we build sustainable businesses around it?

We are undoubtedly in the midst of something significant. Audiences want movies at the speed of TikTok, delivered on the device they carry everywhere, in a form factor that fits the moments between the moments of our lives. When I look at the success of Backrooms and Obsession, I see filmmakers breaking through who sharpened their tools on the whetstone of digital.

I see the same voices emerging in vertical.

This is all part of the continued convergence of digital into our lives. An early format emerging from a fundamental shift in infrastructure that shortens the distance between audience and creator.

In his keynote, Hernan made a point worth amplifying. When television entered American homes, soap operas emerged as one of the medium’s defining early formats. It would have been nearly impossible at that moment to predict that the same box would eventually deliver The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, live sports, presidential debates, and some of the most influential storytelling ever created.

Every generation gets a medium that feels unserious before it becomes unavoidable.

These are still early days. But as I’ve journeyed through this industry, I’ve always tried my best to read the energy of the rooms I’ve been in, and yesterday the energy was saying something powerful and something certain.

Not “if.”

“How.”

I’m excited to see where it takes us next.

Alright, let’s get into it.

America’s First Microdrama Festival Is Coming to New York

Former Tribeca COO Pete Torres and former TikTok Head of Creator Initiatives Rita Vinnik are launching Alza Festival in New York this fall, billed as America’s first festival dedicated to premium microdrama and mobile-first storytelling. We love to see evolving critical legitimacy in the space. (Deadline)

Sunset Studios and Knockout Shorts Build Microdrama Standing Sets

Sunset Las Palmas is making the production pipeline more vertical-friendly, launching an 8,000-square-foot soundstage with standing sets including a courtroom, apartment, bar, restaurant, hospital, and office. More LA infrastructure, please. (Variety)

CandyJar Parent Launches AI-Generated Action Microdrama App Ironblood

Inkitt, the company behind CandyJar, is launching Ironblood, a new microdrama app focused on AI-generated action, sci-fi, and superhero series, with plans to release 30 new titles per month. We’re wondering how this plays into their larger approach on the celebrity side. (C21media)

Versant Media invests in GammaTime

The amount is undisclosed, but the company that owns Syfy and USA has made a move into the space and it will be interesting to see what they do here. We hear we’re going to see a lot more action on the investment side as the year progresses. (Hollywood Reporter)

Screen Time

Platform: TikTok / PineDrama

Genre: Thriller / Relationship Drama / Mystery

Screen Time works for two reasons.

First, it proves psychological thriller is a natural fit for vertical. The genre already runs on urgency, reveals, tension, reversals, and cliffhangers. Those are the same mechanics that make a viewer tap into the next episode. The hook is immediate: a double-date movie night is interrupted when a mysterious figure hijacks the TV and forces the couples to reveal their secrets or risk exposure. By the end of episode one, the stakes are already moving.

Second, it was made by someone with the right mix of traditional and digital fluency. Issa Rae came from the web series world with Awkward Black Girl, built a major Hollywood career, and now returns to short-form with both toolkits. She understands online pacing, audience behavior, and the “key of digital,” but also cinematic grammar, encouraging grounded performance, and story structure.

Screen Time works because the genre fit was strong, and the execution was informed by someone who understands both the internet and the industry. It also represents the full-throated entrance of Tik Tok into the Microdrama space, a major shift that we’ll continue to watch.

The numbers underline the significance here: nearly 75 million views in its first week and more than 150 million views since. If you’re not one of those, I recommend watching it on TikTok or PineDrama today. We like it. Some folks say it’s well done but repetitive. What did you think?

AI Is Splitting the Industry. Is It Splitting the Audience Too?

The conversation around AI in vertical can get very loud, very fast. But when you talk to people actually working in and around the space, the picture is less clear.

Some people are already feeling a major shift. Others are not seeing it yet. Some viewers are curious. Others are simply uninterested.

That may be the more useful story. This week, we’re not trying to decide if AI is good or bad, we’re wondering what effect it’s actually having on the here and now, and we’ve asked a few folks to weigh in. (By the way, if you have any opinions on the vertical world, please share them with us if you feel so inclined.)

AI is not landing in vertical as one single disruption. It is creating a set of parallel questions around talent, production, budget, and audience behavior.

Irv Gelb, a talent manager to some of the biggest actors in the space, told us he has “not seen a meaningful difference” in auditions for talent. From his vantage point, the shift has not yet reached the working actor pipeline in a measurable way.

But we hear different reports from different people. One talent rep told us they’ve seen a big drop in auditions for their actors. One seasoned producer who asked to not be identified told us it’s not about volume, but about material they actually want to make. “It feels like slop is creeping in, but not everywhere.”

And is the anxiety we’re hearing about coming solely from AI, or is it part of a larger perception issue as the sector realigns due to new players, including Tik Tok, entering the space? Matt Shepley, Talent Manager at Select notes “This is a relativistic problem. The micro drama space trained everyone to move fast - and they did. The vertical industry just jumped to warp speed while that was happening. When you’re already in motion, acceleration is nearly invisible.”

That split is worth paying attention to. Depending on where you sit in the industry, AI may either feel like something that is already taking over, or something that is still mostly happening at the edges.

The audience may be just as divided.

Meagan Johnson of Real Reel Drama, a prominent voice in the vertical fan community who watches roughly 30 verticals a month, told us she suspects that “the audience for AI-generated content may be totally different from the traditional microdrama audience.” She has been in the fandom for years, long before AI microdramas entered the conversation, and her read is pretty simple: the people she talks to are not necessarily organizing a boycott. They are mostly just not interested. It is not the kind of content they come to these apps for.

The conversation around AI often assumes everything is competing for the same viewer. But maybe that is not true.

This TNW piece says the market appears to be bifurcating: “AI-generated content serves a different market segment from live-action micro-dramas, and that the highest-revenue titles still tend to be those with human actors, original scripts, and production values that distinguish them…”

Every new technology experiences a massive boom when being adopted, but things level out. Feels like we are in that, and the future is writing itself every day.

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That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

This week: Peacock jumps in, The All American Rejects make a Microdrama, and we consider the (vertical) impact of the upcoming US election.

But first, welcome to a new chapter of The Vertical Bloom.

I’m Scott Brown, founder and CEO of Second Rodeo Productions. My team and I are excited to be bringing you news, insights, and observations about this vertical moment we find ourselves in, with an eye always on its context within the larger boom of digitally native scripted content.

I’ve spent the better part of my career working at the intersection of creators, brands, studios, and emerging formats. I’ve done everything from launching Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s YouTube channel, to crashing a train with MrBeast, to helping bring legacy talent like Larry King into the digital era. But the space I can’t stop talking about right now is vertical storytelling.

Throughout my career I’ve watched initiatives like Youtube Originals, Quibi, or even Sony Crackle come and go, each proclaiming that digitally-native scripted content was here as a robust and lasting sector. Each time the data and the audience proved those claims wrong.

But this moment is different. It’s real. And it comes in a new aspect ratio.

Through Second Rodeo, we’ve had the chance to test that thesis directly. (You can read more here if you’d like.) And through the more than two years we’ve been building we’ve discovered so much, and met an amazing group of people having an incredible conversation about the future of entertainment, of storytelling, of the exploding possibilities of commerce and art.

That’s what I’m excited to share and explore here every week.

Not just the headlines. Not just the platforms. But the bigger question underneath all of it:

What does it mean when a new MEDIUM enters our lives, carried with us everywhere?

I believe vertical is still early. I believe it is more than a trend. And I believe the people who understand its evolving language now will help shape where entertainment goes next.

So, welcome back to The Vertical Bloom.

Let’s get into it.

Peacock Licenses ReelShort Microdramas
NBCUniversal is bringing 10 ReelShort titles to Peacock’s mobile app ahead of its own planned Bravo original verticals.

YouTube Shorts Moves Into the Living Room
YouTube viewers are now watching more than 2 billion hours of Shorts on TVs each month, a reminder that mobile-first formats are no longer staying on mobile-only screens.

Dr Pepper Turns Product Marketing Into Microdrama
Dr Pepper’s four-part TikTok series It’s A Pepper Fling turns the return of Creamy Coconut into a cliffhanger-driven summer romance, showing how brands are utilizing vertical drama grammar for campaign storytelling.

SUPERFAN

Platform: CandyJar

Genre: Comedy / Slasher / Music-Driven Meta-Comedy

This CandyJarTV series is a smart, funny swing for the vertical space: part slasher setup, part band comedy, part fan-service play. Built around The All-American Rejects’ own history, it riffs on their music, legacy, and current image in a way that feels fun for longtime fans but still accessible to casual viewers.

The superfan-kidnapping premise also works as a clever marketing engine, teasing new music inside the story and giving people a reason to keep watching. What makes it especially strong is how naturally it connects to the band’s real world, from the house party concept to the self-aware jokes about who they are now versus who they were in the early album days.

The rollout is also smart. By putting the first episodes on the band’s TikTok, CandyJarTV reaches fans where they already are. Some episodes also start with a quick moment from a band member, giving fans a familiar face before the story begins. That makes the show feel more personal and easier to enter.

The US Election is about to make Vertical Marketing much more expensive.

Part of what we try to do here is bring up things that we’re hearing people talk about. This week we’re tracking the upcoming impact of the election on microdrama apps.

As microdrama platforms scale through paid acquisition, the 2026 election cycle may create a major marketing challenge: the same social, mobile, CTV, and video inventory used to acquire viewers could become dramatically more expensive.

Paid acquisition is currently the primary growth engine for microdrama apps. Sensor Tower found that 68% of U.S. ad spend from major microdrama platforms went to social networks in the first nine months of 2025, while over 80% of DramaWave’s early downloads came from paid advertising.

At the same time, political ad spending is exploding. AdImpact projects $10.8B in political ad spend for the 2025–2026 cycle, Madison and Wall estimate roughly $6.9B in digital spend this cycle. These ads are sold at auction. That’s a lot of money driving up cost.

That matters because political campaigns are increasingly buying on Meta, YouTube, Instagram Reels, CTV, and programmatic video. the exact inventory microdrama apps depend on. Election cycles historically drive CPM inflation and inventory shortages, with some of the sharpest increases occurring in the final 30–45 days before Election Day.

What is this temporary surge in pricing going to do to the space? Will it create an opening for ad-supported platforms like Tik Tok/Pinedrama? Will it shine a brighter light on shows with built in followings via IP or notable names? Will it lead to more apps shutting down? We’ll be watching Q4 closely.

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That’s it for this week’s Vertical Bloom.

We’re excited to keep building this into a weekly home for the ideas, experiments, and creative voices shaping vertical storytelling in real time.

Expect more people from the creative and business trenches of this sector coming in for their own thoughts and opinions.

We’ll be back next Thursday with more headlines, more analysis, and another look at where this medium is headed.

See you then.

Editor: Scott Brown

Writer: Franziska Harms

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

Before jumping into this week’s microdrama news, we’re excited to share that beginning next week, Open Gardens’ Vertical Bloom will be led by and the team at Second Rodeo—bringing readers even deeper behind the scenes of the rapidly evolving vertical industry.

A Quote from Substacker-in-Chief Ben Odell:

“Mitch, Fernando and I are so glad to have Scott on board. Open Gardens isn’t written by journalists or consultants observing the business from the outside. It’s written by producers and filmmakers actively trying to navigate these changes in real time by learning, building, and writing through them. Scott is out there making vertical content right now as a showrunner, director, writer, and producer, and his perspective on where this business is headed will be both unique and inspiring.”

BET Joins the Microdrama Industry with aTwist (a.k.a MicroCo)

BET, the Paramount-owned media group focused on Black audiences, has announced a partnership with microdrama company aTwist—formerly known as MicroCo—to develop and distribute vertical series across both linear and digital platforms. Through the collaboration, BET and aTwist will produce projects designed for both cable television and aTwist’s forthcoming mobile app, which is set to launch this summer. Each series will first premiere on the BET channel before moving to the aTwist platform. The partnership also reflects a larger bet from aTwist that the format can resonate with Black audiences, a demographic the companies claim remains underserved within the current microdrama landscape.

A Quote from BET Studios EVP and Head of Creative Aisha Summers-Burke:

“BET is planting our stake in the ground for the next era of storytelling. The microseries format represents one of the most significant shifts in how content is created, distributed, and consumed, and we’re positioning BET at the forefront of that evolution.”

COL Group Recruits Ex-Paramount and Disney Execs

COL Group, one of the largest players in the microdrama space, has added former Paramount and Disney executives as it continues expanding globally. Jason Ander joins as Head of U.S. Partnerships, bringing experience from TikTok, Paramount, and Hulu, where he held senior roles in digital strategy and integrated marketing. Eileen Low joins as Head of Partnerships and Sales for Asia after previous roles at Canal+ and Disney. The hires reflect a broader shift in the space as microdrama companies increasingly recruit established media executives to build scale beyond the early experimentation phase.

Canela Media Launches ‘Zully’—Bilingual Microdrama Platform

Hispanic media company Canela Media has launched Zully, a new microdrama app offering content in both Spanish and English. Unlike legacy players such as TelevisaUnivision and Telemundo, Canela operates with a digitally focused model, claiming a monthly audience of 60 million users across all platforms. Its strategy is to outpace their competitors, leaning heavily on gen-AI to produce up to 30 series per month. With production centered in Mexico, they’re launching as a fully scripted platform. Zully stands out because it reflects a growing push toward vertically integrated ecosystems where speed, ownership, and scalable production become the primary competitive advantages. If it works, however, can only be revealed with time…

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

Taye Diggs and Co. Launch ‘Microhouse Films’

Microhouse Films, launched by Taye Diggs and partners, is positioning itself as a creator-first vertical platform that strips out traditional gatekeeping layers and hands control back to filmmakers. No subscription fees, no hosting costs, and no ads, with a token-based system that lets creators decide when, what, and how to monetize their content—a clear departure from platforms like ReelShort or DramaBox that rely on aggressive spend and centralized optimization to drive traffic and retention. Will Microhouse effectively differentiate themselves and trailblaze the way in which creatives establish themselves?

A Quote from Founder Taye Diggs:

“When we thought about how to meaningfully impact the vertical space, we immediately focused on the creators and storytellers whose livelihoods depend on where this industry is headed. Microhouse Films is about creating a model that supports them in this next phase and allows them to keep telling stories that move us.”

Platform ‘HighFive’ Re-Releases Features for Vertical Viewing

HighFive is taking a familiar piece of IP and reframing it as a fresh product, debuting The Friendly from Joe Mantegna as a vertically reformatted, interactive experience that can toggle between mobile-native framing and wider aspect ratios, positioning itself as a post-theatrical tool for features that didn’t land in their initial window. The pitch is simple: extend a film’s lifecycle by adapting it to microdrama viewing behavior, where pacing and framing can reshape engagement without producing something new. The real test is whether format transformation alone can create a second audience, or if vertical success still requires building for the medium from the ground up…

Platform Spotlight

Crisp is a platform to watch because it isn’t trying to win on volume, it’s redefining what vertical can be, positioning itself as a curated hub for premium short-form storytelling across animation, documentary, and experimental series. Its hybrid of algorithmic discovery and editorial framing signals a shift toward taste over pure feed optimization, with leadership like Adrian Cheng pushing a strategy built on quality, genre expansion, and brand partnerships rather than repetition. The bet is that vertical can evolve beyond melodrama into a franchise-driven ecosystem, but the risk is clear—curation and experimentation run against the fast, familiar consumption patterns that currently power the space. If boutique platforms can survive among the masses is the question for the foreseeable future…

Show Spotlight

Reborn for the Crown (Vigloo):

Logline: After being humiliated at her high school reunion, Mia collapses and dies with a final wish: to wake up as her 18-year old self. Armed with future knowledge, she’s determined to re-write her past, avoid old mistakes, and rebuild her power…

Genre: Drama-Comedy / Second Chance / Teen

This 55-episode Vigloo series leans into early 2000s American high school comedy-dramas, repackaging familiar teen tropes like social hierarchies, identity reinvention, romance, and rivalry into a vertical format built for speed. It hits the basics with clear archetypes and accessible tone, but maintains the melodrama expected from a vertical. The pacing is efficient as it attempts to mimic its inspiration, but it’s not strategic, with mechanical cliffhangers and underbuilt emotional turns. The takeaway is simple: familiarity creates entry, but without adaptation, it limits engagement.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

In an interview with Forbes, GoodShort co-Founder Brenda Cheong breaks down what drives the microdrama boom, and what to pay attention to…

As new platforms appear daily, it’s becoming harder to differentiate against competitors, but Cheong says the biggest challenge isn’t creating a good series, but the ecosystem that surrounds it. The format works not just because they’re faster, cheaper, and built for how people actually consume content on phones, but because platforms like GoodShort are building full-stack ecosystems around IP, localization, and data-driven storytelling, using rapid production cycles and targeted distribution to scale globally.

The takeaway is that success in this space isn’t about format alone, it’s about controlling the entire pipeline from story to audience

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

L.A. Cuts Permit Fees for Certain Projects—Including Microdramas

After mounting backlash from the L.A. county film community, the L.A. Film Office has introduced the “Low Impact Permit Pilot Program,” a scaled-down initiative aimed at smaller productions. Qualifying projects, limited to—30 cast and crew, a maximum of three consecutive shoot days, and restricted to three locations—will see permit fees reduced from $931 to $350, notification fees lowered from $250 to $156 per location, and Los Angeles Fire Department spot check fees waived entirely, with the program launching April 27. While the move offers tangible relief, it’s narrowly targeted at low-budget shoots and has constraints that many microdramas are already surpassing in production value. Whether this initiative will actually begin to unlock more productions is yet to be determined…

Brazilian Media Giant Globo Reimagines Legacy Films for Vertical

At Content Europe, Brazilian media giant Globo unveiled a slate that, for the first time, includes a full package order of microdramas—marking a notable shift for a company long defined by traditional telenovelas. Leveraging its existing IP, Globo is reworking established films and series for vertical consumption, even pulling recognizable talent into these adaptations to anchor audience familiarity. This kind of IP translation isn’t new, it’s already playing out across multiple markets, but its continued expansion signals a broader industry realignment, where legacy libraries are being actively re-engineered for mobile-native storytelling rather than built from scratch.

Ubisoft Monitors Microdrama Market…

Video game giant Ubisoft, already active in expanding its IP into film and television, has begun signaling interest in microdrama, with Taieb Ben Amor, director of production and business affairs for its film and TV division, stating, “we are seriously considering it.” Still, the hesitation is telling: while the format has proven it can scale, he points to a gap in quality that hasn’t yet met the narrative and production standards expected of Ubisoft’s flagship properties, especially as they prepare higher-end adaptations like Assassin’s Creed at Netflix. That said, the door isn’t closed—Ben Amor acknowledges the space’s rapid growth and the potential to translate their IP into short-form storytelling, making it clear Ubisoft is watching closely, waiting for the format to mature before making a definitive move.

Platform Spotlight

ShortMax is pushing beyond the dominant romance-revenge formula by leaning into fantasy, anime-inspired stories, and horror—genres largely absent from microdrama due to cost. To make that viable, it incorporates generative AI into its pipeline, using it to enhance VFX, environments, and stylized sequences that would otherwise be out of reach. The strategy flips the model: instead of avoiding high-concept worlds, it makes them producible at vertical scale. What sets it apart is this blend of genre ambition and tooling. While most platforms optimize for speed and volume, ShortMax is testing whether spectacle can coexist with microdrama economics—positioning it as an early signal of how the format could evolve as production technology advances.

Show Spotlight

In Love With Mr. Mafia (CandyJarTV):

Logline: A disciplined new student’s life is upended when she crosses paths with a dangerously magnetic classmate tied to a powerful mafia family. What begins as rivalry quickly ignites into a charged connection, pulling her into a world of secrets and hidden truths.

Genre: Drama / Romance / Young-Adult

This 41-episode CandyJarTV series positions itself as a hybrid—part mafia drama, part young adult slow-burn romance. It’s unique in this manner, and while the project has all the ingredients of a high-performing vertical; recognizable tropes, built-in tension, and a clear audience hook—its execution diffuses that potential by splitting the tone and underbuilding key emotional beats. Moments of danger, romance, and world-building are introduced but rarely escalated or paid off, leaving the central relationship and stakes feeling unearned. Still, strong casting and flashes of high-stakes storytelling in the final act point to a more focused version of the series that almost works. The takeaway is familiar: in vertical, the concept gets you in—but commitment to tone and structure is what sustains retention.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

The Real Reel, a quality blog that analyzes microdrama content, does an important case study into the use of AI in the vertical landscape, and what it can mean for all media moving forward…

As platforms like ShortMax begin integrating generative AI into their pipelines, they’re not just cutting costs—they’re unlocking genres like fantasy, horror, and mythology that were previously out of reach for microdrama. This shift expands the creative ceiling of the format, but also raises new questions around quality, authorship, and long-term audience trust. The takeaway: AI in vertical isn’t a trend—it’s a structural change already underway.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

TattleTV reformats Chaplin’s “The Kid” for Vertical

U.K. microdrama platform TattleTV is testing how far legacy cinema can stretch into vertical. Its latest release adapts The Kid by Charlie Chaplin into a mobile-first format—not by cropping, but by generating new image data to fill the frame, aiming to preserve the original composition. The logic is clear: silent cinema, driven by physical performance and visual clarity, translates cleanly to vertical viewing. TattleTV is framing this as a natural bridge between formats, following its earlier adaptation of The Lodger by Alfred Hitchcock. But the real play isn’t preservation, it’s reprocessing. If this works, it opens a pipeline where legacy IP isn’t just remastered—it’s reformatted, extended, and redistributed for a new consumption layer. The question is whether audiences see this as access or interference.

VerzaTV Adjusts Strategy Away from Microdramas 4 Months Post Launch

Verza TV, founded by E! co-founder Alan Mruvka, launched in December as a traditional microdrama platform. Four months later, it’s already pivoting. “Verza 2.0” shifts away from licensed vertical series toward a hybrid model that includes horizontal video and user-generated content. At launch, Verza relied on 80 Singapore-produced microdramas to build its library. Now it’s building a system. By opening to UGC and offering real-time monetization data, the platform is leaning into a feedback loop where content is rapidly tested and optimized. The horizontal addition matters less as a feature than as a signal. The format war is over. The focus now is velocity and iteration. Now, we need to see whether Verza can attract enough creators to make that system stick.

A Quote from Founder Alan Mruvka:

“Verza was built on the idea that the future of entertainment is mobile, immersive, and accessible. By evolving into a creator-driven ecosystem, we’re empowering the next generation of storytellers while maintaining the premium quality audiences expect. We are building the digital theatre for the next generation.”

Blink49 Studios Expands into Microdramas

Canadian indie studio Blink49 Studios is formalizing its move into microdrama. With Canada already functioning as a production hub for the format, the company has brought on Tieren Hawkins as VP of vertical content to build a slate of mobile-first, soap-driven series. Hawkins comes in with direct platform experience, having produced for ReelShort, DramaWave, and ShortMax on Canada’s East Coast. The mandate at Blink49 is straightforward: develop original ultrashort IP and leverage the studio’s relationships with brands, platforms, and emerging apps. This isn’t experimentation, it’s infrastructure. The indie layer is starting to organize around vertical the same way it once did around cable and streaming—the question is how long before this becomes a standard division across every mid-tier studio.

Platform Spotlight

TattleTV is built on reformatting IP, not just producing it. Instead of chasing volume with original vertical series, it leans into diversification; unscripted formats, behind-the-scenes podcasts, and most notably, the vertical reconfiguration of legacy and arthouse titles like The Kid and The Lodger. The strategy treats microdrama less as a standalone format and more as a distribution layer applied across different types of content. That expands what qualifies as “vertical,” while borrowing credibility from established cinema. What makes it distinct is the ecosystem thinking. By pairing reworked IP with supplementary content—interviews, BTS, companion media—TattleTV is mirroring the engagement loops of legacy streamers, where the show is just the entry point.

Show Spotlight

De Repente Casados (ReelShorts / Endemol Shine Brasil):

Logline: After a humiliating betrayal shatters her life, Sabrina enters a high-stakes marriage of convenience with a cold billionaire CEO who needs a wife to secure his empire—forcing two strangers to navigate power, intimacy, and deception as their transactional union threatens to become something real.

Genre: Drama / Romance / Comeback

This 89-episode series is the most recent example of ReelShort’s attempt at global expansion. The IP comes from an established title, Married at First Sight, which garnered 227M views in 2023, but is now reformatted in Portuguese with an updated script and notable actors. Partnering with Endemol Shine Brasil, the vertical capitalizes on all the makings of successful microdrama—quick twists, wide character arcs, and constant conflict. The bet is clear: proven IP plus localized execution can shortcut audience acquisition, but whether that translates into sustained retention, rather than novelty clicks, is where the model will be tested.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Crystal Martinez, a vertical producer and current head of development at MicroCo, heeds an important warning for aspiring creators within the blossoming industry…

As the industry continues to grow, steer clear of creators advertising themselves as “experts” and charging large fees for books, classes, or mentorships—not only because many of them are unproven or scamming, but because the industry is too early for anyone to be an “expert.” Do your research, verify credentials, and prioritize learning from people actively working and delivering results in the space.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

GammaTime Options ‘National Enquirer’ Tabloid Archives

GammaTime is betting that microdrama audiences don’t just tolerate sensationalism—they seek it out. They’ve recently announced that they will begin optioning stories from The National Enquirer, leaning into scandal-driven IP by launching The Drew Peterson Story, a true-crime series built on instant notoriety and pre-loaded stakes. But this isn’t about true crime—it’s about format alignment. Microdrama thrives on escalation and extremes, the same mechanics tabloids perfected. The play is clear: can unscripted hybrids match the retention of romance, or is this just the same impulse in a new wrapper?

Holywater Teases Musical Vertical—Starring America’s Next Top Model Alum

Playback, releasing April 17th on Holywater’s MyDrama, stars Sophie Sumner, winner of America’s Next Top Model, and marks one of vertical’s first true musicals. The series follows Maddie Bryce, a struggling songwriter on the verge of discovery, whose rise is tied to a secret she can’t afford to reveal. Watch the trailer here. It’s one of the platform’s biggest swings yet—pairing a new genre with recognizable talent—another signal that the space isn’t just scaling volume, it’s starting to take creative risks that could actually redefine its ceiling…

A Quote from Holywater co-CEO’s Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov:

“Our mission from day one has been to make vertical series mainstream — not by lowering the bar, but by raising it. Playback brings together some of the biggest names in digital and traditional entertainment — and that’s exactly the kind of project this platform was made for.”

GAM and Minivela Launch Spanish-Language Platform—’Pure Flix Familia’

Great American Media is entering the microdrama space with Minivela, a vertical platform targeting Hispanic audiences across the U.S. and LATAM. Its streamer Pure Flix will merge with Minivela’s mobile-first, creator-driven model to launch Pure Flix Familia, a new platform centered on faith and family storytelling. What’s notable isn’t just the niche—it’s the strategy. By pairing Minivela’s production engine with Pure Flix’s audience data, the platform is effectively building a feedback loop between content and viewership, with vertical series in Spanish, English, and Spanglish produced across the U.S. and Latin America. It’s a targeted bet: not chasing scale broadly, but locking in a culturally specific audience with high engagement.

New AMC Show ‘The Audacity’ Premieres in 21-Part Tik Tok Release

The Audacity, a new show from AMC and Succession showrunner Jonathan Glatzer, premiered on Sunday and took a new approach to its marketing—releasing the entire pilot in 21 segments via TikTok. The installments are numbered to guide sequential viewing, with a runtime and structure that mirrors the current microdrama playbook. It’s an early sign that studios aren’t just competing with microdrama—they’re starting to reverse-engineer it, borrowing its format language to repackage even premium, top-tier productions.

Platform Spotlight

Minivela is built on translating infrastructure, not language. Founded by telenovela veterans, it ports decades of Hispanic production pipelines and audience intuition into microdrama, giving it a cultural specificity most competitors lack. Rather than mimic standard romance formulas, it experiments with runtimes—series spanning 10 to 90 minutes—while focusing on younger, Latinx-immigrant stories that feel lived-in.That positions it as a targeted ecosystem, not a volume play. Its recently announced collaboration with Great American Media only accelerates that trajectory, pairing Minivela’s creative engine with established audience data and distribution. While others import the format, Minivela is exporting a culturally rooted version where real leverage is built.

Show Spotlight

The 7-Year-Old Exam Champion (Vigloo):

Logline: In his previous life, he was a world-renowned scientific genius who died of a heart attack, and was reborn as a young student named Zhang Han. Born into poverty with parents who died when he was young, he is determined to change his fate. He starts with the college entrance exam and, as a prodigy, sets out to change the world.

Genre: Drama / Suspense / Comeback

This 54-episode Vigloo original leans on a sharp hook—a reborn genius navigating childhood to escape poverty through academic dominance. But its real distinction is execution. Centering a child protagonist is a structural risk that’s paying off, with the series topping charts on Vigloo and broadening audience appeal beyond typical demos. What allows it to further stand out is craft and focus. Elevated production design and a narrative engine built on exams and social mobility, not romance, signal a push toward genre diversification. And it works. The question is whether it’s replicable or just an outlier…

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Irvin Gelb, an EP for microdrama series’, argues that the microdrama industry just hit its first true AI shock—one that flips the economics overnight rather than gradually.

In summary, AI-generated series are now dramatically cheaper and scaling fast, pulling ad spend and platform focus away from live-action while displacing crews and compressing production timelines. The implication is clear: this isn’t human vs. AI—it’s ownership vs. replaceability. As costs drop and speed increases, the only defensible position is controlling IP, identity, and audience in a system that no longer rewards labor alone.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

‘Forensic Files’ Sees Vertical Re-Release on GammaTime

Select episodes of TruTV’s Forensic Files are being reformatted for vertical viewing, signaling another push to repurpose legacy IP for mobile-native audiences. Content Partners LLC has licensed a 15-episode slate to GammaTime, where each case will be retooled for vertical pacing and retention while maintaining the show’s forensic-driven core. What stands out isn’t just the format shift, but the source: a once-mainstream, now dormant cable staple being reintroduced through a new distribution logic. If vertical can reactivate true crime catalogs, it begs a larger question—what other forgotten IP is primed for reinvention?

A Quote from GammaTime founder and CEO Bill Block:

“Forensic Files is the gold standard in true crime. Each episode’s tightly structured storytelling and high-impact reveals make them perfectly suited for GammaTime vertical viewing — delivering complete, gripping true crime stories in the mobile-first format.”

Netflix Shuts Down Vertical Rumors…For Now

Netflix is testing short-form in Latin America—but drawing a clear line on format. Despite ongoing experiments and signals from executives, Francisco “Paco” Ramos Netflix’s VP of LATAM Content put the vertical rumors to rest. The company’s first regional short series, Carísima, will remain horizontal, not vertical. That puts it at odds with competitors like ViX and Disney+, which are already moving into vertical storytelling. The takeaway is strategic: Netflix is willing to test duration, but not interface. For now, it’s betting that shortening content can capture new viewing behaviors without abandoning the cinematic grammar that defines its brand. But how long that distinction holds if vertical continues to prove itself remains the question.

FlareFlow Casts Netflix Star for New Microdrama Series

Park Min-Kyu, the breakout star from Netflix’s Single’s Inferno, is making his acting debut in One Year Love, a FlareFlow microdrama launching April 9 on COL Group’s vertical platform. The series centers on a marriage-of-convenience between a Korean expat and a Singaporean workaholic, where a fabricated relationship begins to turn real—until the return of a former partner destabilizes the arrangement. This follows a growing pattern: vertical platforms actively pulling talent from legacy and streaming ecosystems, recently including Taye Diggs, and repositioning them within a faster, lower-friction production model. Microdrama isn’t just a new format, it’s becoming a strategic reset point for actors at different stages of their careers—whether breaking in, crossing over, or recalibrating relevance.

U.K. Microdrama Studio ‘Onset Octopus’ Introduces New Business Model…

UK microdrama outfit Onset Octopus claims to be the first British producer to independently finance and produce a vertical series for international distribution. Founder Ben Pengilly is backing Cowboy After Dark end-to-end, with Dan Lowenstein directing, and a model that includes product placement alongside a key shift: profit participation for the director, echoing indie film structures over typical work-for-hire vertical deals. Microdrama is beginning to absorb—and rework—the deal logic of legacy media, potentially shifting leverage toward creatives and opening the door to a more independent production ecosystem within the format.

Platform Spotlight

BulletShorts, one of India’s top performers, is intriguing due to how it sits on top of existing behaviors rather than trying to create new ones: India’s decades-long habit of daily serialized viewing gives it a built-in advantage, allowing the platform to compress audience engagement. And instead of being hindered by linguistic fragmentation, BulletShorts can leverage India’s multi-language ecosystem as a replication engine, adapting and scaling stories across regions with minimal reinvention. The underlying question is whether this combination—habit, cost efficiency, and modular storytelling—positions it not just as a domestic player, but as a future exporter of microdrama formats.

Show Spotlight

Life Is Not a Game (CandyJar TV):

Logline: A shy teen gamer has secretly posed as a boy online for years, forming a deep bond with her teammate Jupiter, who turns out to be TJ, the popular jock she secretly likes at school. When their esports team earns a shot at a live tournament, her hidden identity unravels, putting her friendships, her team, and her first love at risk.

Genre: Romance / Action / Teen

This 43-episode CandyJarTV series shows how the format is starting to lean on pre-sold IP rather than pure concept velocity. Adapted from a best-selling teen novel, it brings an existing audience and narrative spine into a space typically built on speed and iteration. Instead of engineering hooks from scratch, it compresses established arcs into cliff-heavy episodes optimized for retention. What makes it work is translation, not reinvention. It shows how vertical platforms are beginning to acquire and repackage proven material. The open question is whether this becomes a pipeline for youth IP to find new life—or flattens what made it resonate.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Jen Cooper, a microdrama expert and founder of the ‘Vertical Drama Love Awards’, raises an essential point to the safety and continued growth of the medium—are the dynamics of viewing and marketing leading to the creation of more toxic or extreme subject-matter?

To summarize, Cooper says that microdramas are being optimized for virality, not storytelling. So when algorithms reward shock, sex, and violence—especially in the promotional clips that go viral—it pushes the format into a feedback loop where increasingly extreme content outperforms nuance, risking long-term audience fatigue and a race to the bottom.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

TikTok Begins Casting, Filing Trademarks, for Microdrama Insurgence

TikTok has been quietly laying the groundwork, but it’s no making steps to fully entering the vertical landscape: a dedicated micro-drama feed tested in the U.S., casting underway for in-house soaps, and a November trademark filing for “TikTok Drama” covering short-form series and webisodes. None of this is accidental. And the tension is obvious. Roughly 20 micro-drama companies are already using TikTok’s minis as a distribution layer—and now that layer is turning into a competitor. Whether that’s existential or just noise depends on follow-through. TikTok has a track record of testing media adjacencies (publishing, music services, etc.) without committing long enough to reshape the market. This only matters if they stay, but if they do, they’ll be one to watch…

FlareFlow Partners with Inaugural Live ‘Vertical Drama Love Fan Awards’ in LA

The vertical drama industry heads to Los Angeles this spring as the Vertical Drama Love Fan Awards debut live at the El Portal Theatre on April 2, with FlareFlow—now at 33 million registered users—serving as presenting partner. The hook is simple: no jury, no academy, just audience. Every stage, from nominations to winners, is decided entirely by viewers. That audience is already global, with voters from 100+ countries and safeguards in place: one vote per user, verified by email/IP and reviewed through automated and manual checks. At a time when legacy awards face growing skepticism around transparency, the Love Drama Awards frame fandom as the system itself, shifting credibility from insiders to scale.

A Quote from Founder Jen Cooper:

“The entire industry exists because audiences around the world are watching, sharing and supporting these stories…These awards were created to reflect that, to give fans a meaningful voice in celebrating the talent they love.”

Oscar Winner Armando Bo Launches Microdrama Platform—’Shorta’

Academy Award winner Armando Bo, best known for co-writing Birdman, has launched vertical platform ‘Shorta’ with partners Tomas Escobar and Ariel Arrieta. Based in Argentina and operating in Spain, the company is positioning itself as both a tech platform and a studio, aiming to deliver 100+ original series in Argentina by 2026 and surpass 500 across the region within two years. The slate is already in motion, with 40 series in development spanning multiple genres, anchored by a mix of established industry talent and digital-native creators. We’ve seen this playbook before. As legacy players move into vertical (i.e. MicroCo and others), the ripple effect is inevitable: regional execs follow, building localized pipelines. In LATAM, where consumption is accelerating fast, this isn’t expansion—it’s alignment.

Platform Spotlight

StarDustTV is one to watch because it’s exporting a proven Asian microdrama playbook into new markets before those markets build their own. This isn’t experimentation—it’s replication: high-frequency drops, genre-first packaging, and retention loops engineered for completion, not prestige. The advantage is speed. By reusing formats, story beats, and production pipelines across regions, StarDust operates as a scalable system, not a one-off platform. The trade-off is creative flattening—but in this model, speed tends to win.

Show Spotlight

Dragon Firefighter and His Love (AltaTV):

Logline: A stoic firefighter with a mysterious past crosses paths with a sharp-tongued civilian, igniting a romance that unfolds alongside high-stakes emergency rescues—until his hidden identity threatens to burn everything down.

Genre: Romance / Action / Fantasy

This 50-episode AltaTV series shows where the format is leveling up technically without abandoning its core. The draw isn’t just romance—it’s the blend of practical production (real locations, firetrucks, grounded staging) with VFX/AI to amplify scale. Fires feel bigger, stakes feel real, and the world avoids the synthetic look common in the space. What makes it work is intent. The production value isn’t decorative, it feeds the story. Each rescue drives character and sustains cliff density. It signals a shift: vertical isn’t just getting faster, it’s getting more strategic about where to spend. The open question is whether this hybrid model becomes standard or stays a premium edge…

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Thom Woodley, a writer and producer with experiences in nearly every slice of visual storytelling, has most recently put his focus into the microdrama industry. Here, he emphasizes the key distinction between vertical and the rest, and how knowing that difference can lead to better results…

Vertical storytelling isn’t just a compressed version of film or TV, it’s a distinct medium shaped by how it’s consumed. Cinema is communal and immersive, TV is shared and habitual, but phone viewing is personal, immediate, and intimate—designed for one person, in the moment, with no social buffer.

That shift changes the creative target. Vertical works when it delivers urgency, emotional directness, and “guilty pleasure” hooks that feel privately rewarding, not culturally validated. It’s less about spectacle or discourse, more about compulsion and personal relevance. That’s why it doesn’t replace film or TV—it serves a different psychological need entirely.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

Google TV Announces Updates—Makes it Easier to Make and Distribute Verticals

Last week at SXSW, Google TV didn’t just acknowledge microdrama—it operationalized it. The platform announced that it’s adding a number of microdrama apps to its central hub, and has made innovations to make it easier for viewers to find and watch them. But the real signal is infrastructural: Juanjo Duran framed Google TV as a distribution backbone for creators who are unable to create their own tech stack. In other words, the platform is absorbing the cost and complexity that used to define entry. That’s not a feature update. That’s a market correction.

A Quote from Tommy Harper, microdrama producer and founder/CEO of VeYou:

“For our platform, we don’t have to produce it in-house. We want to, in a sense, be like HBO mashed up with TikTok. We want to elevate the content and put it on our platform.”

Legacy Reality Show ‘SuperModelMe’ Turns Vertical on FlareFlow

Refinery Media and COL Group have announced a reboot for SupermodelMe—reformatting it for a different medium entirely. The franchise, which ran six seasons and gained international reach with Netflix distribution, is being rebuilt as a vertical, mobile-native reality microdrama titled SuperModelMe: Make It or Break It, set to launch on FlareFlow. This isn’t a spin-off—it’s a structural shift: a legacy unscripted IP redesigned for scroll-based consumption, where pacing, stakes, and narrative are engineered for retention, not broadcast. If it works, it won’t be treated as an experiment. It’ll be a template.

Amazon MX Player Announces ‘Fatafat’—Vertical-Only Section for Streaming Platform

Amazon isn’t testing microdrama in India—it’s scaling it. Through its AVOD platform MX Player, the company has launched Fatafat, a mobile-first vertical series hub built directly into its existing ecosystem. The timing isn’t accidental: Lumikai tracked 450 million downloads and 100 million monthly users in India’s microdrama market in 2025, with growth still accelerating. Amazon isn’t entering early—it’s entering once the behavior is proven. And importantly, this isn’t a side bet. Romance, thrillers, youth content—Fatafat is being positioned as a core layer of the MX Player slate, not a novelty tab. If Amazon can fold vertical into its broader content engine at scale, it sets a precedent for how global streamers may localize—and operationalize—the format going forward.

A quote from Head of Content Amogh Dusad:

“Micro-dramas open up exciting creative possibilities for storytelling. With Fatafat, we are building a diverse slate of serialized stories across genres while keeping the experience fast, engaging and accessible to viewers everywhere.

Platform Spotlight

MoboReels is one to watch not because it’s refined, but because it’s honest about what the format actually is. While other platforms posture toward “premium” vertical storytelling, MoboReels leans fully into high-frequency, emotionally charged, pulp-driven narratives that map directly to user behavior—not industry taste. That philosophy extends to production: the platform is already integrating Gen AI, including animated shorts and synthetic content pipelines, to accelerate output and validate ideas at scale. The result is a system where volume isn’t just a strategy—it’s infrastructure. If microdrama is ultimately a retention business disguised as storytelling, MoboReels isn’t lagging behind—it’s stress-testing the outer limits of how much content the model can sustain.

Show Spotlight

Spore Fall (EdenStone):

Logline: Set in the fictional city of Lionara, the series centers on a disillusioned soldier and a rogue medic forced into an unlikely alliance after an infected man develops abilities that could accelerate human evolution—or trigger its end.

Genre: Drama / Action / Dystopian

This AI-generated series from EdenStone is less notable for its premise than for what it reveals about the next phase of production scalability in microdrama. While the narrative remains human-written, the execution is fully AI-generated, from environments to visual effects, collapsing what has traditionally been the most expensive layer of production into a software problem. The result isn’t just cost reduction, it’s a redefinition of scope. Microdrama has historically traded scale for speed. AI starts to erase that compromise. If the visuals clear the threshold of believability, the ceiling for storytelling expands—and production value stops being the constraint.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Austin Herring, a writer, producer, and director in the vertical industry and CEO of Snow Story Productions gives his unique take on how the microdrama industry is changing the way actors can get work and make a name for themselves…

Vertical microdramas are resetting the entry point for actors—no legacy access, no union bottlenecks, just audition and deliver. But getting cast isn’t the challenge; staying working is. The format runs on speed, so reliability beats raw talent—prepared, consistent actors create time and options, while difficult ones get phased out fast. The upside is volume: more shoots, more reps, faster growth. Strip the ego, show up ready, and be easy to work with. This is one of the few corners of the industry where that actually compounds into opportunity.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

Range Media & 100 Zeros—Google’s Production Outfit—Partner for Microdrama Initiative

Range Media Partners and Google’s production initiative, 100 Zeros, are making a deliberate play to legitimize the microdrama economy by importing proven hitmakers from legacy television. Their slate includes projects from The Bachelor creator Mike Fleiss, American Idol architect Simon Fuller, Charlie’s Angels director McG, and a Kenan Thompson–produced comedy, signaling that vertical storytelling is beginning to attract the same creative class that once built broadcast reality and studio franchises. Behind the scenes, 100 Zeros is building a full-stack pipeline spanning financing, production, distribution, and monetization across vertical video, with a mix of scripted and unscripted series designed for serialized, bingeable consumption. Projects will roll out across multiple platforms, with a first-look window on the Google TV mobile app on Android devices, which recently launched a dedicated microdrama hub in the U.S.—a sign that platform infrastructure is finally catching up with the format’s growth.

Indie Horror Vet Charles Band Launches Vertical Label—Full Moon Artists (FMA)

Veteran indie horror producer and direct-to-video pioneer Charles Band is expanding into vertical storytelling with Full Moon Artists, a new banner alongside his Full Moon Features company. Partnering with vertical entertainment regulars Eric Guilmette, Sarah Moliski, Felix Merback, and Rebecca Stoughton, the company plans a slate of microdramas for platforms like ReelShort and other vertical apps. The model builds on Band’s 2025 ReelShort thriller Dungeons of Ecstasy, which debuted as a multi-episode vertical series before being repackaged as a traditional horizontal feature for platforms like Prime Video and Tubi—turning microdrama into the first window of a broader distribution strategy.

A Quote from Charles Band:

“Working alongside this team, all of whom are among the biggest names in their field, to form this new venture has been both exciting and eye opening. These creatives are on the cutting edge of the Vertical world, and we have big plans to develop some truly incredible entertainments for some of the most relevant Vertical platforms out there, while also making innovative inroads into the independent feature film markets.”

India’s Amazon MX Player Announces 2026 Slate—with Verticals at the Center

Amazon MX Player, the free Indian streaming platform owned by Amazon, is preparing a slate of more than 150 new and returning series, with a significant portion dedicated to microdramas. Central to that push is MX Fatafat, the platform’s vertical video hub, which has seen rapid year-over-year growth as short-form serialized storytelling gains traction with mobile-first audiences across India. The fact that a major streamer like Amazon MX Player has carved out a dedicated vertical ecosystem suggests the category is no longer a novelty, but an emerging staple of the region’s streaming economy.

Platform Spotlight

KukuTV represents vertical’s regional localization thesis: microdramas built specifically for Southeast Asian audiences rather than imported from Chinese or American studios. Focusing on markets like India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, the platform blends the format’s familiar cliffhanger-driven pacing with local language, talent, and cultural themes which allow it to grow thoroughly and rapidly. As vertical expands globally, KukuTV suggests growth may increasingly come from regional production hubs adapting the format for their own markets…

Show Spotlight

A Werewolf Song of Fire and Frost (NetShort):

Logline: Forced to marry a feared fire-wielding Alpha, a wolfless outcast discovers her husband is her fated mate—and when her family betrays her, she unleashes the legendary White Wolf destined to destroy them.

Genre: Fantasy / Drama / Romance

This 41-episode NetShort original is less notable for its plot mechanics than for what it signals about the format’s technical evolution. While the series follows the familiar vertical fantasy structure—betrayal, fated mates, and a rejected heroine rising to power—its real distinction lies in the aggressive use of AI-assisted VFX and digital environments to elevate the spectacle. The result is a microdrama that feels closer to a miniature fantasy epic than the genre’s typical lo-fi productions, suggesting how quickly the space is moving to approximate Hollywood-scale visuals—even if it hasn’t fully closed that gap yet.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Jonas Barnes, the CEO of Pixie USA and the creator of the first P&G microdrama, gives his unique take on the future of verticals, and how it can be used to help business exposure.

Barnes believes that microdramas give brands a way to produce narrative entertainment quickly and cheaply, allowing them to integrate products directly into stories instead of relying on traditional ads. Rather than interrupting content with commercials, brands can own the narrative itself, test ideas rapidly, and align storytelling with marketing cycles—turning entertainment into a flexible, ongoing advertising system amid contemporary advertising fatigue.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

COL Group, BeLive Holdings Launch Microdrama Starter Kit

COL Group and BeLive Holdings have unveiled a fully integrated “Microdrama in a Box” solution, combining BeLive’s cloud-based platform infrastructure with access to COL’s extensive microdrama catalogue. The pitch: broadcasters, telecoms, and streamers can launch a fully branded vertical-drama platform in about 30 days without building the tech or licensing pipeline themselves. The companies will break down the model at Hong Kong International Film and TV Market (FILMART) in a session titled “How to Launch a Successful Microdrama Platform in 30 Days.” The broader implication is clear—microdrama is evolving from a content format into a deployable platform business, packaged for rapid global rollout.

Lifetime Adds Microdramas to Upcoming Slate

Taye Diggs—best known for Broadway marquees and feature filmmaking—is now stepping into the microdrama landscape, this time as a producer for Lifetime. The project, Tides of Temptation, isn’t a standalone series but a digital companion to the upcoming film Terry McMillan Presents: Paradise With You, which Diggs also stars in. Both titles sit within Lifetime’s expanding “Love of a Lifetime” franchise, unveiled at A+E Global Media’s recent upfront presentation, with the microdrama designed to circulate online ahead of the movie’s cable premiere. If the model works, it signals a notable shift: microdramas moving from disposable content to a marketing engine—potentially turning short-form storytelling into the first stage of the film release funnel.

A Quote from Rob Sharenow, President of Programming for A+E Global Media:

“When we first heard the pitch from Autumn and Taye for a micro drama connected to a movie, it felt like a smart, strategic way to enter the vertical space. It allows us to expand the world of the film while meeting audiences wherever they are, without compromising on storytelling quality or production value.”

New Brazilian Microdrama Platform Launches—’Pop! Pop! Pop!’

Grupo Abril has launched Pop! Pop! Pop!, a new platform dedicated entirely to vertical microdramas, now available free on Google Play. The service combines original Brazilian productions with licensed international titles, marking one of the first major pushes by a legacy Latin American media company into the format. For a publisher that has produced written and visual media for decades, the move signals something larger: microdrama is no longer just a mobile experiment—it’s becoming a legitimate programming category for mainstream media companies across LATAM.

First U.S.-Africa Microdrama Co-Production Launched

Both Worlds and Freeli Films have launched a cross-continental partnership aimed at developing both premium microdrama series and feature films. The slate will shoot across South Africa, the broader African continent, and the United States, targeting audiences on both sides of the Atlantic while pairing American talent with established African performers. Taye Diggs—who previously worked with Freeli on the upcoming romantic drama Another Man’s Wife—is set to star in the companies’ first co-productions, signaling an early attempt to fuse Hollywood-recognizable talent with regional African production ecosystems as microdrama begins expanding beyond its original Asian and U.S. strongholds.

Platform Spotlight

FlexTV represents vertical’s Westernization thesis: English-language microdramas adapting to the format’s classic fast-paced, cliffhanger-driven storytelling for U.S. and global audiences. Blending licensed titles with original productions, the platform leans into Western romance, wealth fantasy, and revenge melodrama rather than relying solely on imported catalogues. As vertical expands internationally, FlexTV suggests the format’s next phase may depend on cultural translation—reshaping microdrama’s storytelling engine for audiences outside its original markets.

Show Spotlight

The Billionaire Ex-Wife Strikes Back (Vigloo):

Logline: After years of humiliation in a loveless marriage, a discarded wife rebuilds her life in secret—only to return richer, smarter, and far more powerful than the billionaire who once threw her away.

Genre: Revenge Romance / Billionaire Drama

This 70-episode Vigloo original is a clean distillation of the format’s most reliable narrative engine: humiliation, reversal, and status reconfiguration. Built around the familiar “wronged woman returns powerful” structure, The Billionaire Ex-Wife Strikes Back moves quickly through betrayals, secret identities, and escalating power shifts designed to land a payoff every few minutes. It’s effective not because it reinvents the trope, but because it understands vertical fluency—microdrama thrives on recognition, and revenge fantasies remain one of the format’s most efficient vehicles for keeping audiences locked into the scroll.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Jas Wang, a feature and microdrama producer, delivers an interesting take on how to think about quality verticals…

Her core argument is simple: vertical microdramas operate on the same storytelling logic as high-concept Hollywood films—only at a fraction of the budget. Both formats hinge on a clear, instantly graspable “what if” premise that prioritizes plot momentum over character depth. Just as blockbuster films rely on escalating stakes and spectacle to keep audiences engaged, vertical dramas compress that same adrenaline-driven structure into 60-second episodes built around constant cliffhangers.

The difference isn’t concept, but scale. As audience habits shift toward faster, premise-driven storytelling, formats that deliver immediate narrative payoff are winning across platforms—from theatrical sci-fi and horror to mobile microdramas. With platforms like DramaBox reaching tens of millions of monthly users, the producers succeeding in this space are focusing less on thematic depth and more on execution: identifying a compelling “what if” and delivering it as quickly—and relentlessly—as possible.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

Televisa-Univision Launch Microdrama-Specific Platform—ViX MicrO

TelevisaUnivision has officially launched its vertical drama unit in Mexico City, formalizing what had been eight months of quiet testing under the ViX umbrella. Branded ViX MicrO, the initiative aims to surpass 100 microdramas by year’s end and scale to 300 within the next two to three years, according to content chief Damián Villar. The early numbers justify the ambition: more than 80 titles produced, 900 million social views, six million daily connected users, and 80 million minutes watched in 2025 alone. When the largest Spanish-language media company in the world operationalizes vertical at this scale, it signals that microdrama is no longer a digital sideshow—it’s becoming embedded inside mainstream broadcast infrastructure, with the reach and marketing muscle to accelerate the format across Latin America and beyond…

A Quote from General Director of Content and Production Damian Villar:

“This is a volume business. If you don’t have volume, the user finishes a story and goes to another platform. And since it’s 100% our IP, we can keep the content active and develop sequels, spin-offs, or even turn them into a series or soap opera if they work.”

GammaTime to Produce Spanish-Language Content in Int’l Co-Production Deal…

GammaTime has partnered with Latin American production company Idilio, founded by Gabriela Tafur, on a five-series Spanish-language vertical slate. Structured as a co-financing, co-production deal, the projects will target bilingual U.S. audiences and viewers across Latin America—bridging markets that are often siloed. Focused on romance, soap, and crime thriller, the slate is a strategic play: culturally fluent IP designed to travel. For a U.S. vertical platform, it’s a calculated move to capture underserved Spanish-speaking audiences before legacy players fully adjust.

HOLYWATER Series Lands Reality TV Star as Lead

Maksim Chmerkovskiy—best known for Dancing With The Stars and The Traitors USA—has stepped into the vertical spotlight as the lead in HOLYWATER’s Wild Silence. The series follows Camilla, who wakes in a remote cabin after surviving a suicide attempt, rescued by Jack, a grieving recluse with wounds of his own. It marks Chmerkovskiy’s first leading role in a scripted vertical—and the first U.S. vertical to center a reality TV star in that position. The casting is more than stunt value. As vertical platforms scale budgets and audience reach, recognizable television—and eventually film—talent will increasingly view the format not as a detour, but as a viable front-facing arena for star-driven IP.

Constantin Entertainment Produces First Major German Microdramas

Constantin Entertainment, the German production-distribution giant, has entered the vertical arena with a big swing, partnering with Crisp Momentum to launch two series totaling 60 episodes—all produced within the last eight weeks—making it the first major German player to move decisively into short-form vertical drama. In December, it also debuted Aminho: The Challenge, a creator-led, AI-animated vertical about a young street footballer chasing his breakout, targeting global Gen Z males. When a legacy European studio commits IP, capital, and speed to vertical, it underscores not just geographic expansion—but rising authenticity and institutional confidence in the format.

Platform Spotlight

KalosTV represents vertical’s genre-diversification thesis: male-skewing, anime-inflected, and built for a Gen Z audience largely overlooked by the billionaire-romance loop. Instead of inheritance melodrama, it leans into crime, action, and gaming-adjacent storytelling rhythms, carving out a tonal lane distinct from its competitors. As vertical scales, KalosTV suggests differentiation—not spend—could be a real advantage. By targeting Gen Z males with anime-coded IP, it’s testing whether the format can broaden its demographic ceiling beyond its romance-heavy core.

Show Spotlight

The Cheer Scandal (CandyJar TV):

Logline: When a secret-stripper and a hot-headed basketball star fall for each other at a conservative high school, their explosive chemistry ignites a scandal that threatens their futures, their reputations, and the one person they’re terrified to lose—each other.

Genre: Romantic / High School / Scandal

This 47-episode CandyJarTV original turns high school cheer politics into a scandal engine, compressing rivalry, betrayal, and social exile into minute-long collisions where every rumor lands as a hook. It doesn’t reinvent the teen drama—it optimizes it, structuring humiliation and revenge as tightly wound retention loops. What sets The Cheer Scandal apart is its youth recalibration. Swapping billionaire fantasy for Gen Z-coded stakes and social-media fallout, it shows how vertical can industrialize adolescence the same way it once industrialized romance—packaging teen melodrama into algorithmic shock cycles built for repeat engagement.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

This week’s Industry Insider is a case study done by Patrik Wilkens, who takes a look at a Netflix acquired show that is Tik Tok approved and eerily follows the microdrama format…

Samuel—Émilie Tronche’s 21-episode, four-minutes-each French animated series—racked up 35 million European views before Netflix acquired it for 2026. Tronche launched vertical one-minute cuts on TikTok and Instagram first, meaning social validated the show before broadcast or streamer money entered. The funnel flipped: audience first, platform second, global licensing third.

Made by a single creator in minimalist black-and-white, Samuel had no franchise scaffolding—just connection. While nine-figure franchise bets struggle, this proves attention isn’t shrinking, it’s restructuring: build short, test publicly, let engagement de-risk the spend, then monetize the reach.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

COL Group Expands Distribution Reach to MENA

COL Group International is accelerating its global push, with CEO Tong Zhilei signaling that vertical video is entering its “next competitive chapter.” At MIP London, the company unveiled Narativ Media as its official Middle East and North African distributor, and named Rock Networks as the exclusive Southeast Asia telco partner for FlareFlow. The announcements follow COL’s recent appointment of Harbour Rights to handle Europe and Latin America. Through its Singapore-based microdrama division, COL says this coordinated distribution build-out—paired with an expanded content slate—positions the company to scale its library past 1,700 microdrama titles worldwide, a new precedent for the rapidly evolving industry.

BBC Studios Eyes Microdrama Move, Says CEO

Speaking to press at the BBC Studios Showcase, Tom Fussell, CEO of BBC Studios, outlined potential “inorganic growth” opportunities on the horizon. Noting the talent behind long-running series’ like EastEnders and Casualty—delivering high-quality storytelling at lower costs, he claimed that this model could translate directly to microdramas. Fussell added that the company is actively exploring the space, including how AI might be used with further conversations around microdrama expected in the months ahead.

Microdrama Daily Usage Outperforming Legacy Streamers, Says Omdia Analysis

Omdia reports a pivotal shift: U.S. mobile users now spend more time watching vertical video than Netflix, Disney+, or Prime Video on their phones—a major signal for a format still early in its lifecycle. The economics follow the attention. Global microdrama revenue reached $11B in 2025, is projected to hit $14B by year’s end, and exceed $20B by 2030. Some stats include—ReelShort averages 35.7 daily minutes per user, outpacing Netflix (24.8), Prime Video (26.9), and Disney+ (23). Netflix still leads in monthly U.S. mobile users (12M vs. 1.1M), but microdrama’s engagement intensity is significantly higher. If scale belongs to legacy streamers, intensity belongs to vertical—and in a mobile-first economy, we’ll see who wins…

A Quote from Maria Rua Aguete, Head of Media and Entertainment at Omdia:

“Microdramas are no longer a niche experiment. They are becoming a core driver of mobile video engagement. What stands out is not just revenue growth, but the intensity of usage. On mobile, microdrama apps are generating more daily viewing time than the world’s biggest streaming platforms.”

MIP London—Microdrama Panel Demystifies Audience Retention Strategies

At MIP London, the marquee panel “MicroDrama 2026: The Global Breakout” zeroed in on the economics driving the surge. Timothy Oh, General Manager of COL Group International, noted that as much as 90% of budgets are allocated to marketing over production—a sign that short-form has effectively become a user-acquisition business modeled on mobile gaming. Platforms now test thousands of trailer variations across social feeds to optimize installs. Anatolii Kasianov, co-founder and co-CEO of Holywater, added that acquisition costs can run $20–$30 per install, making data analytics and AI essential tools for controlling spend and sustaining growth. Taken together, the conversation made clear that microdrama’s future won’t be defined by storytelling alone, but by who can most efficiently buy, retain, and monetize attention at scale.

Platform Spotlight

JoyReels represents vertical’s localization thesis: culturally targeted, diaspora-focused, and calibrated for markets beyond the U.S.–China core. Rather than relying solely on billionaire-revenge loops, the platform leans into South Asian and MENA storytelling textures, tailoring tone and casting to specific audience identities while still operating within the microdrama monetization playbook. As the format globalizes, JoyReels signals a shift toward owning cultural niches as a competitive advantage—not just outspending rivals on installs.

Show Spotlight

Legally Sexy and Mr. Ice Cold (DramaBox):

Logline: A one-night stand with billionaire Leo Whitney leaves law student Summer Ellis unexpectedly pregnant. Her toxic sister, Angie, steals Summer’s identity and becomes Leo’s fiancee. Six years later, Summer crosses paths with Leo again—this time with her five year old daughter, Melody. Their buried truth begins to resurface, and love ignites.

Genre: Romantic / Billionaire / Corporate

This 57-episode DramaBox original headlines the trending page. The corporate-fantasy engine runs at full compression, distilling boardroom power plays and slow-burn romance into minute-long detonations where every glare is a hook and every insult a cliffhanger. It doesn’t reinvent the billionaire trope—it optimizes it, delivering emotional reversals with algorithmic precision and structuring tension as monetization rhythm. This is romance engineered for retention: archetypes kept clean, dominance dynamics heightened, and each beat calibrated for coin unlocks. If early microdramas proved the format could replicate soap, this series shows how ruthlessly it can industrialize it—turning melodrama into behavioral design.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Jesse Whittock, media journalist for Deadline, poses an interesting question: where are traditional distributors amongst the microdrama boom?

Usually quick to chase emerging trends, traditional TV distributors have been notably absent from the booming microdrama sector. While producers and platform executives lead the charge, major sellers have hesitated, viewing vertical as a platform-driven, direct-to-producer model that moves too fast and too cheaply for traditional margins.

With Chinese services commissioning at scale and AI accelerating output, the model often sidesteps distributors entirely. That caution stands in contrast to the numbers: Omdia values microdrama at $11B in 2025, with strong growth ahead and China dominating revenue.

A handful of smaller players are experimenting through partnerships and vertical edits of library content, but the broader question remains: in a business built on speed, data, and direct platform deals, is there real space left for traditional distribution?

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

Prime Video Confirms Microdrama Exploration—Says VP

Prime Video’s new VP of International Originals, Nicole Clemens (ex-Paramount Television Studios), didn’t hedge: Amazon is watching the micro-series surge closely and isn’t ruling out a move. At the same time, she’s doubling down on exportable non-English originals—content built to travel, not just trend locally. This announcement feels inevitable following concrete statements from other media giants such as Disney and Netflix. The question now is—who will strike first, and who will do it best?

Holywater Doubles Down on AI: Absorbs Jeynix and Rebrands as ‘Holywater Tech’

In a move that formalizes its tech-first DNA, vertical powerhouse Holywater has acquired AI-assisted VFX company Jeynix and will now operate under the name Holywater Tech. The rebrand isn’t cosmetic — it codifies what the company has always prioritized: building proprietary technology into the core of its production pipeline. Jeynix, known for hyper-realistic visual effects and performance-preserving AI workflows, is being integrated to deliver cinematic-level visuals at microdrama speed and cost, while enabling rapid localization across markets in a matter of days. In a format defined by volume, margin sensitivity, and global scalability, this is less about aesthetics and more about competitive infrastructure. If tech-native production becomes the baseline, are traditional in-house studios prepared to keep pace — and when AI capability becomes standard, what does that ultimately mean for the creative ceiling of the content itself?

Quote from a joint statement by co-founders / co-CEO’s Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov:

“Holywater Tech aims to build a category-defining entertainment company that brings together creators’ imagination and cutting-edge technology, especially AI, to unlock new creative possibilities at scale. Jeynix demonstrated a level of visual truth and performance preservation like face matching, that we simply couldn’t find elsewhere. Bringing this expertise in-house allows us to reinvest our production budgets into significantly higher quality, faster iteration, and more consistent results across our slate.”

Crocs Steps Into Microdrama With ReelShort Debut

Crocs has entered original entertainment via microdrama, launching Charmed to Meet You on ReelShort on February 13. Inspired by a real love story involving an employee, the short-form series follows a young woman who sparks a flirtation with her mysterious neighbor by leaving a Jibbitz charm on his bare Crocs Classic Clogs; a romance told in scroll-ready episodes. This isn’t a campaign; it’s narrative product placement built for vertical consumption. As brands look for deeper audience connection, microdrama is emerging as a storytelling-driven marketing channel—and Crocs is simply early to the shift.

Platform Spotlight

DreameShort represents vertical’s IP-native turn: romance-forward, data-backed, and built directly from a web-novel ecosystem rather than speculative development. Instead of chasing scale through raw volume, the platform adapts pre-validated digital fiction into tightly engineered micro-episodes calibrated for emotional clarity and paywall conversion. The strategy isn’t discovery, it’s optimization. As vertical professionalizes and tech tightens its grip on greenlights, DreameShort embodies a larger shift: when audience data validates story before production begins, efficiency becomes the moat — and the open question is how much creative risk the format can still afford.

Show Spotlight

The Golden Pear Affair (P&G):

Logline: When a young woman’s sister disappears amid an international jewelry heist, she’s pulled into a globe-spanning mystery where romance and betrayal glitter just as brightly as the stolen gems.

Genre: Romantic Adventure / Mystery

This 55-episode “microsoap,” totaling just under 80 minutes, compresses the DNA of daytime melodrama into 60-to-165-second bursts. The Golden Pear Affair isn’t reinventing the soap—it’s resizing it. Cliffhangers replace act breaks, emotional reversals land every two minutes, and the serialized engine does what it has always done best: weaponize longing.

For Procter & Gamble, the company that helped invent the soap opera format in the 1930s, this isn’t experimentation, it’s evolution. When a legacy architect of broadcast melodrama embraces vertical distribution, it signals permission for the broader industry to stop treating microdrama as a side bet and start recognizing it as the next logical container for serialized storytelling.

Poster for ‘The Golden Pear Affair’

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Evan Shapiro, a data analyst working with legacy institutions across all types of media, shares his critique of the microdrama model. See a brief breakdown of his argument below:

Exemplified by ReelShort—he claims that the structure is broken. Built on aggressive pay-to-unlock mechanics and massive CPI spend, any revenue generated is burnt by acquiring users, resulting in staggering losses. Any organic growth, he says, is churn monetized through paid acquisition at escalating CACs. Add inconsistent market data and opaque reporting, and the foundation looks less like a scalable media business and more like a cash-intensive growth loop that only works with deep-pocketed backing.

That said, vertical itself isn’t the problem—the model is. A shift is underway toward ungated, ad-supported distribution, where brands, agencies, and premium platforms are rethinking microdrama as vertically formatted television rather than loot-box content. The next phase isn’t gated micro-episodes; it’s premium, ad-supported vertical TV built for simultaneous life on streaming and social. The format is evolving, just not in the way its early pioneers predicted.

Read the rest of his take here.

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Welcome to The Vertical Bloom, a weekly dive into the fast-growing world of microdramas and vertical storytelling. Here, we unpack the platforms, creators, and deals shaping the format that’s quietly redefining what it means to make—and watch—television in the mobile age.

Fresh Takes

COL Group Continues Global Expansion with Distribution Push into Europe/LATAM

Hong Kong–based Harbour Rights is moving to globalize the vertical boom, striking a distribution alliance with China’s COL Group International to roll out more than 1,000 micro-dramas across Europe and Latin America. As the exclusive distributor in both regions, Harbour will market titles from COL-owned platforms, specifically FlareFlow and 17K, targeting both vertical-native apps and legacy media companies now pivoting toward the format. The deal reflects a growing consensus: after scaling in China and the U.S., microdrama is no longer a regional experiment but a format poised for a coordinated global push.

A Quote from Teremoana Seguin, Managing Director at Harbour Rights:

“Navigating the international distribution landscape for this new format presents unique challenges, from technical specifications to platform strategy…Our role is to offer partners a comprehensive, end-to-end solution, from initial content assessment to structuring complete output agreements. We simplify the process and enable platforms to seamlessly integrate this essential content and capitalize on its immediate audience appeal.”

‘Watch Club’—Founded by Facebook Alum & Backed by Google Ventures, Set to Launch

Watch Club is betting on short-form drama as infrastructure, not just content. Led by ex-Facebook product exec Henry Soong and backed by Google Ventures, the startup is launching with 10 scripted series while working directly with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. Aimed at young women, its coming-of-age dramas are designed in a way to fuel interaction, fandom, and reaction content—blurring the line between consumer and participant in a way that many microdrama platforms haven’t yet accomplished. With backers from HBO Max, Hulu, Meta, Patreon co-founder Jack Conte, and the Sidemen’s Upside Ventures pointing to a bigger goal: building a social network disguised as a drama platform.

A Quote from KJ Sidberry, partner at Google Ventures:

“We’re drawn to founders who are obsessed with the change they intend to bring into this world…Henry deeply understands the intersection of storytelling and social connection. He gets how young audiences discover, discuss, and fall in love with content. It’s a new model for entertainment that can move at the speed of culture.”

Knockout Shorts to Launch with SAG-AFTRA Approved Project

Knockout Shorts is making a pointed entrance into microdrama by playing both sides of the table: early to the format, but institutionally fluent. The L.A.–based studio—founded by former Ace Entertainment, A24, and Freddy Wexler Company exec Matthew Ko alongside seasoned vertical producer Chris Crema—is launching with a slate of originals that includes what’s being billed as one of the first SAG-AFTRA–covered vertical series, reportedly headlined by an Oscar-nominated actor. The union’s blessing isn’t subtle: Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland has positioned Knockout as proof that vertical can scale creatively without reverting to labor shortcuts—an early signal that microdrama’s next phase may look a lot more like Hollywood than its scrappier origins.

Platform Spotlight

CandyJar TV represents the earliest North American answer to vertical—romance-forward, fandom-driven, and unapologetically emotional at a time when the format was still finding its footing. Rather than chasing scale through sheer volume or imported IP, the platform leaned into original storytelling that prioritized intimacy, heightened stakes, and repeat-viewer attachment. CandyJar wasn’t built to industrialize microdrama; it was built to make audiences care. As the space professionalizes and capital floods in, the question isn’t whether CandyJar can compete on output—but whether the industry remembers that loyalty, not velocity, is what first made vertical stick in the U.S.

Show Spotlight

In Love with My Ex’s Uncle (AltaTV):

Logline: After a painful breakup, a young woman finds herself drawn into an illicit, emotionally charged relationship with her ex’s uncle—blurring family boundaries and reopening wounds she thought were closed.

Genre: Taboo Romance / Drama

This 60-part AltaTV series leans into vertical’s most reliable engine: taboo as acceleration. In Love with My Ex’s Uncle doesn’t justify its premise—it deploys it, using secrecy, proximity, and power imbalance to sustain pressure rather than expand plot. The result is a show that understands vertical fluency: when the emotional math is this clear, discomfort becomes momentum, and recognition does the work spectacle usually would.

To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…

Industry Insider

Meagan Johnson, a microdrama screenwriter and advocate, poses an important question as the frameworks of the growing vertical industry continue on the rise in this new year: who exactly is protecting the integrity of the stories being consumed? Johnson says that there’s a growing tension inside the English-language microdrama ecosystem: as the format professionalizes, story has become the quiet casualty.

A clear arc has arisen—2024’s rough but narratively rich experiments gave way to 2025’s slick, scalable, and increasingly hollow output, arguing that the industry solved production and monetization faster than it protected emotional coherence.

The provocation isn’t nostalgic or anti-growth; it’s structural.

If vertical drama is built on speed and volume, someone still has to be accountable for narrative integrity, audience trust, and long-term satisfaction. The warning is simple but urgent: without advocates for story at the center, microdrama risks optimizing itself into forgettability just as it reaches mass scale.

Read the whole take here.

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