The Vertical Bloom: 01/08/25
Your guide on the happenings of the vertical drama landscape.
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.
The Vertical Bloom will return next week in typical format. In the meantime, we felt it pertinent to look at a topic being constantly talked about: integration of AI into workflow. HOLYWATER has been making waves in more ways than one but for the sake of this article, they offer us a perfect entry point into this particular topic.
See you next week!
How HOLYWATER Uses AI to Turn IP Into Community
Since announcing its deal with FOX, Ukrainian tech startup HOLYWATER has become a company the industry is watching closely—not only because they make vertical dramas, but because of how they do it. Through its two core platforms, MyPassion (serialized fiction) and MyDrama (vertical video), co-founders Bogdan Nesvit (CEO) and Anatolii Kasianov (CTO) have built a system where AI isn’t a bolt-on tool—it’s the connective tissue between IP, production, and audience.
The foundation is books. MyPassion operates at scale, hosting millions of readers and generating real revenue from serialized romance and genre fiction. That scale matters. HOLYWATER uses AI to track engagement patterns across text—completion rates, rereads, emotional spikes—then flags which stories are most likely to translate into visual formats. In other words: audience validation happens before a single frame is shot.
That same data feeds directly into MyDrama. Once an IP is selected, HOLYWATER deploys custom-trained AI models to analyze the source material, generate episode outlines, and draft scripts optimized for vertical pacing. A flagship example is The Shy Beauty and the Billionaire Beast, one of the platform’s top-performing series this year. It wasn’t just adapted—it was engineered.
And HOLYWATER doesn’t stop at the episode cliffhanger. MyDrama users are invited to interact with the characters themselves.
After watching a few chapters, viewers can chat with characters like Jaxon—the billionaire love interest—ask questions, receive images, and build a relationship that extends beyond the narrative. In a demo shared with TechCrunch, users interact with Hayden, earning his trust through quizzes about the story world. A visible “trust meter” gamifies the experience, reinforcing engagement through progression mechanics borrowed from games, not television.
Behind the scenes, AI continues to quietly do the heavy lifting:
Localization at speed: AI-driven language and cultural adaptation allows content produced in one market to feel native in another—names, references, and context shift dynamically for viewers in Brazil, the U.S., or elsewhere.
Community-driven gen-AI testing: On MyMuse, users generate AI-assisted content around popular characters and settings, turning fandom into R&D. As reported by Forbes.
Personalized discovery: Internal algorithms continuously refine user libraries based on behavior, not demographics.
What’s next? Who knows for sure.
HOLYWATER has signaled deeper use of generative AI to reduce costs and accelerate production—though whether the creative ceiling holds is still an open question. What is clear is this: by blending human taste-making with AI-driven scalability, HOLYWATER isn’t just producing vertical dramas. They’re building ecosystems where stories are written, localized, extended, and monetized in conversation with their audience.
That’s the real disruption—not the format, but the feedback loop.