The Vertical Bloom: 01/29/26
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.
Fresh Takes
Dhar Mann Partners with FOX and Holywater to Create Microdramas…
Dhar Mann is making one of the cleanest, most strategic moves into microdrama to date—partnering with FOX and Holywater on a multiyear deal to produce at least 40 narrative-driven vertical titles, with the “initial slate” language doing a lot of work. The shows will first window on Holywater’s MyDrama, then roll out globally via Fox Entertainment Global. The key detail, though, is leverage: Mann keeps ownership and creative control, meaning these microdramas can later be redeployed across his massive YouTube and Instagram audiences for complete ad revenue. This isn’t just a deal—it’s a blueprint, fusing studio distribution with creator-owned IP in a way legacy media has been structurally incapable of pulling off.
A quote from Fox Entertainment CEO Rob Wade:
“Dhar Mann’s inspiring, undeniable storytelling excellence and passionate audience have made him one of the most powerful and consequential voices in entertainment today. Entering the global vertical video arena in partnership with Fox and Holywater is an exciting next step in the studio’s remarkable trajectory. As leading partners to creators exploring this growing ecosystem, we’re primed to expand Dhar Mann Studios’ reach by super-serving his new and existing fans everywhere with this all-new, original vertical content.”
Microdrama Platforms Fuel 2025 Video App Download Charts
A new Sensor Tower report makes the shift unmistakable: streaming growth in 2025 was driven not by legacy platforms, but by microdrama. Global video app downloads rose 39% and revenue 18%, fueled by short-form drama apps that grew more than 100% year over year—while traditional streamers fell over 4%. The rankings tell the real story: DramaBox and ReelShort topped global downloads ahead of Netflix, with Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ lagging behind. Taken together, it signals a structural reordering of the streaming economy—where growth now follows attention, not tradition, and narrative scale is being rebuilt one scroll at a time.
Netflix Plans Vertical Redesign
Netflix is preparing a major mobile overhaul, leaning harder into short-form and vertical video as it adapts to a social-first ecosystem shaped by YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Announced on its Q4 earnings call, the redesigned app—set to launch in late 2026—will deepen swipeable, feed-based clips, building on tests Netflix has been running since May of last year, potentially expanding into new formats like video podcasts, according to co-CEO Greg Peters. The subtext is hard to miss: this isn’t a cosmetic update, but a strategic admission that the future of streaming isn’t just about what you watch—it’s how fast and frictionlessly you get pulled into watching it.
Alfred Hitchcock Goes Vertical — Who’s Next?
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog may have just crossed a historic threshold—becoming one of the first canonical films re-engineered as a microdrama. Now streaming in the U.S. on the UK vertical platform Tattle TV, the 1927 silent has been re-cut for a scroll-first, mobile-native experience. Rather than treating the film as untouchable archive, the move reframes it as a translation—reshaping classic cinema to meet contemporary viewing habits head-on. This matters because it doesn’t just preserve film history, it reactivates it— opening the door for younger audiences to discover classic cinema in a visual language they actually understand.
Platform Spotlight
AltaTV operates well outside the hype cycle, positioning itself around ultra-lean production and romance-first vertical storytelling. The platform prioritizes speed, volume, and familiarity over polish—less a prestige play than a live test of how low the cost floor for microdrama can go without breaking audience retention. AltaTV isn’t trying to redefine the format; it’s probing its limits. The real question heading into 2026 is whether this efficiency-first model is sustainable—or quietly accelerating a race to the bottom.
Show Spotlight
Love or Dare (MyDrama):
Description: Love or Dare is the first-ever romantic vertical reality show to premiere on MyDrama. Mixing passion, tension, and emotional survival, this series doesn’t just test love — it pushes it to the breaking point. Each couple faces intense physical and emotional challenges designed to expose their deepest insecurities and truest feelings.
Genre: Reality / Game-Show
This 80-episode MyDrama original, Love or Dare, is one of the clearest attempts to compress reality TV into the microdrama economy. Centered on couples pushed through escalating physical and emotional challenges, the series distills unscripted television to its most addictive elements—confessionals, confrontation, and constant cliff turns engineered for the scroll. It’s a smart watch not because it’s novel, but because it’s fluent: in vertical, reality doesn’t need arcs, only pressure.
To understand what this kind of success means for the industry, I turned to the people shaping it behind the scenes…
Industry Insider
DramaBox’s Head of Studio Shicong Zhu took to Linkedin to share an interesting insight into her philosophy regarding the expansion of successful IP within the vertical space. She claims that Vertical drama doesn’t scale like traditional TV. Where legacy media “...compounds vertically through seasons and character arcs, vertical storytelling compounds horizontally,” by repeating and remixing emotional engines, not extending the same characters.
Built on freemium models that reward immediacy over longevity, success isn’t driven by renewals but by how effectively a core emotional hook can be redeployed across new stories. The real question isn’t “Will there be a Season 2?” but “Which emotional pattern is strong enough to run again—and how boldly can it be remixed?”
Read the interesting take here.
Really sharp breakdown on the horizontal compounding insight. The Dhar Mann deal shows how creator-owned IP can ride both distrubtion rails without losing control, which is prob the only sustainable model when platfroms are this fragmented. Been noticing this shift but hadn't framed it that clearly till now.
OMG
Colour, sound, television, VCR, streamers, AI and now. vertical - the times are a’changin’
WOW
Great newsletter