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From the group chat: someone asked for "one good show, nothing heavy," and four of us replied with the exact same vertical mafia romance inside a minute. We have become the algorithm we feared.
Fremantle and the BBC just went vertical
Here is a launch worth a bookmark. RoseBerry, the vertical studio that set up shop this spring with library deals across the biggest names in television, just flipped on the consumer switch. Its app, Epis, went live around the world on July 14, live on the App Store, Google Play and mobile web, opening with more than 100 titles cut for the phone.
What makes it land is who is behind the shelf. Epis draws on library partnerships with Fremantle, All3Media International, Banijay Rights, A+E Global Media and Cineflix Rights, with shows from the BBC and Channel 4 reworked for vertical viewing, spanning true crime, drama, reality, dating and documentary. It is not just recycling either: RoseBerry is lining up 25-plus original vertical productions this year, including titles like Two Marys, true-crime series The Swindler and the Billionaire Murder, and Lime Pictures comedy Revenge Is a Dish. Viewers sample for free, then pay to keep going. Premium television intellectual property (IP), meet the swipe.
Why this matters for you: A new premium buyer just opened its doors, and it wants both kinds of work: polished adaptations of prestige IP and 25-plus fresh originals this year. If you write, direct or produce vertical, that is another commissioner to pitch, one with real broadcaster money and real library muscle behind it. The shelf that pays for a 90-second story keeps getting deeper, and this one has Fremantle and the BBC stocking it.
Sources: Deadline · The Hollywood Reporter · Realscreen · Advanced Television
Big library, small screen, that is one move; here are the others worth your time, home turf first and then the map.
🇺🇸 United States
1. An Artificial Intelligence microdrama landed a 90-million-user shelf, and the stock cratered anyway. Globavend Holdings (Nasdaq: GVH) said its Loomi studio signed a global distribution deal putting its fully Artificial Intelligence (AI) produced English microdrama The Wolf King's Forbidden Bride onto DramaBox, a platform with more than 90 million registered users across 200-plus countries. Investors were not charmed: GVH fell about 61% to roughly USD 1.90, from USD 4.76. The read underneath the number is the useful part: DramaBox will now take finished outside titles, even AI ones, through a plain distribution deal, which is a new door for independent work, whoever, or whatever, made it. → GlobeNewswire · RTTNews
2. The instinct that made you good at television will sink your vertical script. A new Real Reel guide for film and TV writers crossing into the format makes the case plainly: the reflex to set up before you pay off, correct almost everywhere else, is the exact habit that kills a vertical scene, where setup is a tax the audience never agreed to pay. If you are bringing a traditional writing room brain to the phone, this is the unlearning list, and it is short and brutal on purpose. → Real Reel
3. Here is the map from finished script to shootable series. A fresh script-to-screen breakdown walks through the mechanics newcomers keep getting wrong: chopping one story into 80 to 120 single-beat episodes, placing a cliffhanger on every exit, and moving the money from the shoot into the edit where vertical actually lives. Different muscle from writing the thing, and the piece treats production as its own craft rather than an afterthought. → flicknexs
Here's what else is new:
A step-by-step vertical script guide arrives for 2026. A new how-to lays out the four-part beat structure the category has converged on, hook to cliffhanger, for writers building their first phone-native series from scratch. → Filmustage
Rolling Stone says the format has gone mainstream. A culture read tracks vertical microdrama's jump from scrappy app curiosity to something Hollywood is openly racing to monetize, union paperwork and all. → Rolling Stone
🌐 Worldwide
1. India's vertical boom is flashing green and red at once. A new C21Media feature reads India's microdrama scene as genuinely mixed: investment still pouring in and subscriptions climbing, even as some platforms quietly fold and hard questions pile up around revenue models and how long subscribers actually stick. For anyone pitching into India, the takeaway is not "avoid," it is "know which buyer is funded past this year before you sign." → C21Media
2. A UK streamer just commissioned a Cape Town sitcom, vertically. Pay-per-view (PPV) platform Amavizion launched its first vertical original on July 15, Shambles, an 18-plus micro-sitcom about three housemates in Cape Town, 36 episodes of 45 seconds to two minutes, directed by Bonnie Rodini through South Africa's Rodini Films, with the full season priced at about USD 2 (GBP 1.49). A comedy, out of Cape Town, from a British buyer, which is three fresh things at once in a genre pile mostly stacked with romance and revenge. → C21Media · VideoAge
3. Abu Dhabi money is funding K-drama pacing for Arab audiences. South Korea's Eugenius, led by former Disney+ Korea founder Eugena Jung, raised USD 3 million from Abu Dhabi's Shorooq to build short drama that pairs Korean-style pacing with Arabized storytelling for Middle East and North Africa audiences. A funded new buyer means a new market opening up, so if you can write for the region, or partner with someone who can, there is fresh commissioning money looking for scripts. → Yalla KPOP · The National
Here's what else is new:
Korea's short-form market is chasing the billion mark. South Korea's short-form drama business was worth roughly USD 490 million in 2024 and is projected to push toward USD 1.5 billion in the next few years as webtoon studios and broadcasters pile in. → Seoulz
The global pie is now roughly USD 14 billion. Worldwide vertical-drama revenue reached about USD 14 billion in 2026 per Omdia, up from around USD 4 billion in 2023, a reminder of how fast the money under all of this has compounded. → verticaldrama.tv
Today's Pick
New to the format or coaching someone who is? This one is a podcast built entirely around vertical film, and its early episodes are a clean, friendly walk through what a vertical series actually is and why the micro-drama boom happened, straight from people making the work. → Listen on Spotify
Between a British library standing up vertical and a Cape Town sitcom finding a buyer, the count of doors marked "bring your 90-second story" went up again today. Go knock on one.
Until tomorrow. Stay Vertical.
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