New players are flocking to the vertical video market as it becomes embedded in traditional production and distribution pipelines – and after observing cautiously from the sidelines, the US studios now want in.
Around 18 months ago, several new names began appearing on the app download charts in North America, surpassing established streaming players like Netflix, Hulu and Disney+.
These new entrants included the likes of ReelShort, DramaBox, My Drama and, more recently, FlareFlow, all platforms specialising in cliffhanger-laden vertical series with episodes lasting between one and two minutes and often spanning more than 70 instalments.
The unexpected ascension of these apps was initially ignored by the traditional Hollywood ecosystem, which swore off shortform once and for all after the oft-cited collapse of Quibi. But things change fast in Hollywood, and the legacy of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s quick-bite streamer is being rewritten and re-contextualised in real time as the microdrama movement takes hold.
One of the first American outfits to publicly declare its entry to the space was Cineverse, the LA-based studio and free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) company that wowed Hollywood last year as its low-budget horror feature Terrifier 3 achieved a US$90m box-office on a US$2m production budget.
Cineverse was previously backed by Chinese private equity, and its principals have keenly followed developments in both China and the broader pan-Asian market, as these typically serve as a precursor to trends in North America.
The trend lines were quickly becoming too clear to ignore, according to Cineverse’s president and chief strategy officer Erick Opeka, and the company felt it needed to move quickly to capitalise on an opportunity that has not yet been understood in Hollywood, which has historically been slow to react.
Today, there is already an established ecosystem around microdramas, with multi-billion-dollar revenue streams and an engaged fan base that simply didn’t exist when Quibi came and went. According to a recent report from Media Partners Asia, microdrama revenues in China will exceed the country’s box office this year, having grown from US$500m in 2021 to US$7bn in 2024 and projected to reach US$16.2bn by 2030. Outside China, revenue is expected to hit US$9.5bn by 2030, up from US$1.4bn last year.
Earlier this year, Cineverse partnered with Banyan Ventures, a venture capital outfit led by Lloyd Braun that had also been circling the microdrama space. The resulting 50/50 joint venture, MicroCo, was formally launched in August, with two more high-profile execs joining jumping aboard: ex-Showtime president Jana Winograde as CEO, and former NBCUniversal Television & Streaming chairman Susan Rovner as chief content officer.
MicroCo will serve as both a studio for producing vertical series and a platform to stream them, with the company saying at the time that it wants to be the “first US-based studio and AI-native platform built specifically for high-quality micro-series: serialised, shortform, mobile-first content specifically designed for modern viewing habits.”
A (micro)climate change for the industry?
Opeka says the microdrama opportunity is arguably unlike anything seen in the content space for the past 25 years.
“I look at it as probably the first new professional format in the market since reality TV. And whether you like reality TV or not, it changed the game for television,” he tells C21. “It created a whole plethora of companies, and an entire ecosystem in the tens of billions of dollars annually – of production, development, releasing and its own star system. That is exactly what’s going to happen with the microdrama space.”
From Rags to Rank One drew 238 million views in just one day, according to COL Group
The new format is already creating recurring stars, several platforms are growing rapidly and traditional producers are flocking to get in, making it very different to the contracting TV business and the now-mature streaming sector. Microdrama “embodies a lot of the excitement in the space that is very much needed to invigorate the community,” says Opeka.
There is also the matter of money. While budgets range quite widely, the average cost is around US$200,000, according to estimates. That can drop to around US$15,000 for very small projects and go up to US$400,000 for bigger ones from established vertical drama studios. In the future, it is believed AI will bring down costs further.
As shortform vertical dramas become more common in Hollywood, they may also cause companies to take an expanded approach to production, says Opeka. One example would see MicroCo extending some of the IPs housed within Cineverse, or Braun’s various companies, into the microdrama space. Another would see it produce dedicated shortform vertical versions of longform projects.
“When we make a low-budget movie, can we tack on an extra seven days of production and make the microdrama for an incremental increase on the budget? That’s one option we’re exploring,” he says.
Opeka adds that MicroCo hopes to bring some traditional Hollywood business models into the microdrama space. Namely, sharing in revenue with producers and creators. “We know that the industry works best when the talent is compensated, versus more constrained models,” he says.
By Opeka’s count, there are currently between 40 and 50 “viable” microdrama apps in the market globally, though perhaps none have the same access to Hollywood talent that MicroCo does. The company plans to elevate the writing and the production quality, although Opeka is quick to stress that “the format doesn’t need ridiculous sums of money.”
In the time since MicroCo announced its launch, a raft of other US players have revealed plans of their own. Just this week, former Miramax CEO Bill Block announced the launch of GammaTime, a vertical video platform co-founded with Slava Mudrykh and Alex Montalvo, alums of Google and Quibi respectively. GammaTime launched with 22 microdramas, including two from CSI franchise creator Anthony E Zuiker. This marks the first time a major Hollywood showrunner has announced projects for a microdrama platform, according to GammaTime, which raised US$14m in a new funding round.
Alan Mruvka, the founder of E! Entertainment Television, has also launched an app, Verza TV.
Most significantly, Fox Entertainment has also entered the space via an undisclosed equity investment in Holywater, the Ukraine-headquartered firm behind platforms such as My Drama, one of the most downloaded apps across North America and Europe in recent months, and My Muse, a vertical video app that produces series with the help of generative AI. With the deal, Fox Entertainment Studios is creating and producing more than 200 vertical video titles for My Drama over the next two years, with production on several already underway in Atlanta, Georgia.
NBCUniversal’s Telemundo Studios has also announced a slate of four vertical video series, including biblical series María, Mother of God.
C21 understands Disney and others are exploring the space and are poised to make moves. In Germany, too, ZDF Studios is exploring the possibility of producing and distributing microdramas, CEO Markus Schaefer said this week. First, however, it must figure out how to make a business model that originated in China work in Western Europe, he said.
While the format still draws derision from some, it is also gaining legitimacy within the industry, with US actors’ union SAG-AFTRA recently announcing a new Verticals Agreement covering productions with budgets under US$300,000. The agreement, full details of which have not yet been published, is “tailored to address the fast pace and tight budgets of vertical storytelling, while maintaining strong protections for SAG-AFTRA members,” said SAG-AFTRA.
Leading lights of a micro revolution
Globally, ReelShort has been one of the platforms spearheading the ascension of microdramas. Owned by Silicon Valley-based Crazy Maple Studio, which is in turn backed by China’s COL Group, the platform has drawn huge viewership for its proprietary titles, including The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband (492 million views) and Breaking the Ice (334 million). In both cases, these projects have been adapted into multiple languages, with the remakes also garnering hundreds of millions of views. Other scripted romance titles include How to Tame a Silver Fox and The Quarterback Next Door.
ReelShort’s scripted romance title How to Tame a Silver Fox
While soapy, over-the-top, romance-focused stories have been ReelShort’s bread and butter, the platform is beginning to dabble in new genres too. It recently launched its first reality series, Love Bombing, consisting of 175 episodes. C21 understands more reality projects are in the works, while the platform is also moving more fully into the thriller genre. Holywater-owned My Drama also spoke to C21 recently about how it is expanding into multiple new genres and regions.
Within ReelShort, there is a growing sense that microseries from outside the romance genre will be a meaningful growth driver in the future. As such, it recently launched a global contest, Real Vertical Impact, asking creators to showcase a 40-second vertical creation. The winner will have their project adapted as a full microseries.
In Canada, ReelShort’s development and production is overseen by project manager Keri-Lee Kroeger, who says she is hunting for stories of all descriptions. “I want a great story with dynamic characters and addictive plots, ones that you just can’t look away from, whether they come from existing IPs or if they’re original stories,” she says.
In terms of the production model, Kroeger says projects are typically financed in one of three ways: by ReelShort’s in-house team, commissioning third-party producers or, on occasion, with outside investors backing specific projects.
One example of ReelShort searching for IP in interesting places is The Billionaire’s Fake Wife, an adaptation of a 1980s Bollywood film called Kissi Se Na Kehna. Set to shoot this fall, it is ReelShort’s first announced project in the Canadian market, with production from Vancouver-based Service Street Pictures, led by Sammie Astaneh. Many more are expected to follow in Canada, which has become something of a hotbed for production for these shortform projects.
For Astaneh, who was primarily a TV movie producer before expanding into microdramas last year, he believes now is a good time to be involved in the space, given the number of platforms coming online, the enormous appetite for new content and the scope to innovate in both storytelling and financing models.
The producer, whose company has also produced One Last Temptation Before I Say I Do for platform GoodShort, says the format is a surprisingly nuanced meeting of art and science. “People might say the content is a bit tropey, slapstick or over the top, but there’s a lot of data and science behind every single episode, especially the first 10 episodes when you’re establishing the story,” he says.
Monika Dalman, a casting director working in British Columbia, has had a front-row seat for the expansion of the vertical drama sector. Since mid 2023, Dalman alone has cast more than 60 microdramas – indicating just how many such projects are being filmed in North America.
Dalman estimates there are at least 20 shooting in Vancouver at any one time. And given that production usually takes around 10 days, it’s easy to see how quickly the format is growing in North America.
In 2023 and 2024, Dalman says microdramas were the exclusive domain of small video production companies, but more established players are beginning to move in. They have had to learn some lessons along the way, though.
Around six months ago, Dalman says some established TV and feature film producers reached out asking where they were going wrong. They were pitching vertical dramas that would typically “knock it out of the park” for a network but getting no bites from the microdrama platforms. The disconnect, says Dalman, centred around stars.
“For these projects, it’s not about attaching a name and team that is considered to be bankable,” she explains. “When [microdrama platforms] see an actor who’s famous, all they see is somebody who is expensive, and they know from experience that they don’t need to spend huge money on an actor to get the results they’re looking for.”
Breaking the Ice has been adapted into multiple languages
TV movies are the closest thing to microdramas in the traditional content world, argues Dalman, as they have a similar romance-fuelled storylines, a similar number of script pages and are similarly reliant on cliffhangers to get viewers to sit through commercials.
Networks that commission these types of projects – Hallmark, Lifetime and, increasingly, streamers like Netflix – would be smart to experiment in the microdrama arena, says Dalman, potentially allowing them to retain their audiences and attract new ones.
Using the very rough calculation that a TV movie costs between US$1m and US$5m and a microdrama costs US$200,000, one could theoretically make between five and 25 of the latter for the cost of the former. This makes microdramas – which typically now draw much larger audiences than TV movies and provide much better audience data – an ideal “sandbox” in which to experiment,” she says.
“It would be a great investment, because as time goes on and the leads on Lifetime, Hallmark or other shows get older, we of course want to introduce new talent. And if you could treat a vertical like a sandbox for a network, you can test different storylines and talent pairings, but for a fraction of a cost,” Dalman says. She adds that some networks are already experimenting with this idea, which she argues would “strengthen brand awareness” rather than cannibalising the existing audience.
How could microdramas shake up international distribution?
On the distribution side of the business, there are also indications that microdramas could start to become an important piece of the licensing pie.
Earlier in the year, Crazy Maple Studios parent company COL Group launched a content distribution division, with over 1,000 titles being made available to broadcasters, streamers, telcos and digital platforms in both English and Cantonese. From Rags to Rank One is among COL Group’s most successful titles, with the 105-part historical epic drawing 238 million views in just one day, according to the company, and 77 minutes of watch time per user. In China alone, that project has cleared one billion views.
Prentiss Fraser, the newly installed president of sales and distribution Fox Entertainment Global (FEG), also recently told C21 that vertical video is an area she is interested in. She stopped short of saying it was an area FEG would certainly enter, but her interest in the burgeoning medium as part of a goal to “experiment and invest in parallel paths.” Given Fox Entertainment’s subsequent investment in Holywater, it seems likely FEG will be selling vertical videos sooner rather than later.
Will the US studios and streamers go all-in?
The bigger the space becomes, the more likely it seems that all the major US studios will make microdrama a part of their broader global content strategies. Cineverse’s Opeka believes it will happen sooner rather than later, as the revenue potential becomes too enticing – and without the risk of rapidly lighting billions of dollars on fire, as was the case with Quibi.
“Studios are slow adopters, usually late adopters, and usually acquirers,” says Opeka, citing FAST as an area where US studios were slow to move until the “revenue streams were undeniably rich enough.”
Given how rapidly the microdrama sector is growing, however, the adoption cycle is going to be far shorter than it was for FAST.
“The venture capital and foreign money pouring in, and the undeniable rankings and revenue streams that you’re starting to see in the app stores, mean it’s going to be undeniable for them. Especially given the values it’s going to bring to their existing base of IP, they stand to benefit the most of anybody by leveraging it.”
Hear more about this hot topic at the Vertical Programming & Microdrama Summit, a part of Content London 2025.
