The whole TV dial, rebuilt for vertical.
The team behind Shtisel and Survivor is betting that real TV, not micro drama, wins the phone.
"They're getting a very high calorie, low taste experience from the vertical landscape today."
Lior Friedman
Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+ and Peacock all bolted a vertical feed onto their apps this year. Quibi got to premium mobile video first, burned through a reported $100,000 a minute and lasted six months. The phone won the attention war years ago. The premium content to fill it still isn’t there.
This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, Evan Shapiro and I bring Guy Hameiri and Lior Friedman, co-founders of RoseBerry, a vertical premium television studio. It picks up where our Lisbon episode with Bogdan Nesvit of My Drama left off, when he told us that the five telenovela arcs of micro drama can’t sustain the format on their own. Guy and Lior are the two people who took that seriously.
These are TV people first. Hameiri sold Abot Hameiri, the Israeli studio behind local Survivor, X Factor and Netflix’s Shtisel, to Fremantle and ran it as chairman until the end of 2024. Friedman comes out of Amagi and started his career as a TV anchor. Their thesis is that micro drama was only the first wave and the rest of television, true crime, dating reality, soap, scripted, is heading to the phone next.
How though? The engine underneath their operation is an AI tool they’ve named Red Snapper. The deals are in place: Fremantle, Banijay, A&E, All3Media and Cineflix, with a pipeline they put in the hundreds of titles by year-end.
For proof, they handed us an 18-year-old episode of Neighbours, the Australian soap, recut vertical for Fremantle with a paywall dropped at a plot cliffhanger. They explain what they pulled out of the frame and what they deliberately left in.
Then came the news and this was the part I’d been waiting for. Three months ago they had a real question mark over whether anyone would watch non-micro-drama on a phone. Now their own app, epis, has the first-party data to settle that discussion and the conversion and session numbers are strong.
When the launch first crossed my desk, I wrote that I might finally have to change my mind on micro dramas. I’m still not all the way there. But these are TV people mixing content, tech and AI and that is a different animal from what we’ve seen so far.
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That’s it for today but before you go:
🎙️ Live Pod Alert
On September 10th, during Streaming Made Easy Live, we will record a live episode of The Media Odyssey Podcast. Come see us live! TMO listeners get 15% off tickets here.
No, I'm too old for that.