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From the group chat: "do not start that one, you will lose the whole day." Reader, we started that one. We have seen nothing since. Worth it.
HBO Max makes it a clean sweep for vertical
Warner Bros. Discovery just became the last major streamer to add a vertical feed. On July 28, HBO Max rolled out Shorts, a TikTok-style scroll of trailers, clips and pivotal scenes pulled from its library, alongside Ask HBO Max, a conversational search that takes plain-English prompts like "best movie for a girls night in." Both are testing with select US users first, Shorts on iOS and the search tool on Android, before a wider rollout.
With that, every big streamer, Netflix, Disney+, Peacock and now HBO Max, keeps a vertical shelf inside the app. The clips are chosen by artificial intelligence (AI) reading scene-level metadata, then curated down by human editors.
Here is why it should not read as just another discovery gimmick. Disney switched on its Verts feed in March, then commissioned its first original vert, Locker Diaries. Feeds like this have a way of turning into commissioning pipelines, and a fresh one just lit up at the studio sitting on more intellectual property (IP) than almost anyone.
Why this matters for you: The takeaway is not that HBO Max wants your microdrama tomorrow. It is that the last big holdout just blessed the format, and the same path that turned Disney's feed into an original commission is now running inside Warner. When a studio this size starts scrolling, the pitch you have been sitting on has one more door worth knocking on.
Sources: TechCrunch · WBD Pressroom · TechTimes · Broadband TV News
🇺🇸 United States
1. Brands are quietly becoming vertical's newest buyers. A Variety read out of Cannes Lions tracked consumer brands funding their own microdramas: Marc Jacobs cast Rachel Sennott in a series called The Scene, InStyle's office microdramas have pulled roughly 48 million views across platforms, and Crocs' Charmed to Meet You reached about 10 million. A brand budget spends the same as a platform's. → Variety
2. The union floor for vertical work nudged up. Under SAG-AFTRA's Verticals Agreement, built for US shoots budgeted below $300K, pension and health (P&H) contributions rose to 21.5% as of July 1, and a lead on a 10-day, 8-hour shoot is owed roughly $2,500 in scale on top of benefits. Fast does not have to mean unprotected. → SAG-AFTRA
3. Casting a vertical series now works like a dating app. Verticast, the swipe-to-match casting platform co-founded by actors Darren Darnborough and Richard Cambridge, went live on Apple's App Store, letting producers and casting teams find talent by swiping instead of digging through submission piles. Match, cast, shoot. → Deadline
Here's what else is new:
Comcast spinoff Versant takes a stake in GammaTime. Versant Media, the publicly traded company spun out of Comcast, took a minority position in Bill Block's premium microdrama app GammaTime and will adapt its channel brands into vertical series. → The Hollywood Reporter
Mark Stern and Lloyd Braun start an AI animation studio for microdramas. Intelligent Animation, from the former Syfy and ABC executives, fuses machine learning with traditional animation and has two bite-size series in the works, both drawn from webcomics licensed off Tapas. → Variety
🌐 Worldwide
1. China's biggest short-drama platform is policing its AI faces. On July 22, ByteDance's Hongguo issued rules banning the reuse of near-identical AI faces across shows, requiring distinct, recognizable leads and drawing three copyright red lines around borrowed characters, costumes and artwork. Even the AI has to bring range now. → Global Times
2. A Bollywood library is being rebuilt for the phone. Mumbai's Sameer Sippy Productions formalized a pipeline with Vancouver's Service Street Pictures to adapt the N.C. Sippy film catalog into vertical microdramas, starting with the 1983 hit Kissi Se Na Kehna, remade as The Billionaire's Fake Wife for ReelShort. Old scripts, new aspect ratio. → C21Media
3. In China, people are renting their faces to AI dramas. Platforms like Shenzhen's ActID now pay ordinary people to license their likeness for AI microdramas, roughly $15 to $74 an episode and up to about $700 a production, while Guangzhou's internet court works through some 700 face-theft cases from the past three years. Your face, now a line item.→ Rest of World
Here's what else is new:
China aired its first fully AI-generated drama on national TV. State media framed the broadcast as a milestone, reopening the debate over how far automation should go in a market where more than 95% of new short dramas already lean on AI. → Global Times
India's vernacular microdrama race keeps pulling in new platforms. Short-video and OTT players across India are scaling regional-language vertical slates, pushing the format past the metros and into Tamil, Telugu and other tongues. → Exchange4media
Today's Pick
Producer Maggie Han, founder of the Short Drama Alliance, runs a podcast that sits working vertical directors and producers down to talk shop, and it is a clean way to hear how these shows actually get built. → Listen on Spotify
Every big streamer now keeps a vertical shelf, and shelves like that tend to get hungry for something new to put on them, which is where you come in.
Until tomorrow. Stay Vertical.
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