Search

Home > Sangre Celestial > Micro dramas on phones: Will Hollywood startup win audiences?
Podcast: Sangre Celestial
Episode:

Micro dramas on phones: Will Hollywood startup win audiences?
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-09-03 19:00:00
Description: The streaming app Quibi was around for less than a year in 2020, offering videos that ran 10 minutes or less, meant to be viewed on cell phones. Now, the Hollywood-based company MicroCo is launching a new version of that idea. China is a leader in producing micro dramas, streaming thousands of shows viewed by hundreds of millions. The question is: Will it work in Hollywood? Quick-bite entertainment on the go — like while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting to board at the airport — was the intent of Quibi, says Brooks Barnes, who reports on Hollywood for The New York Times. The platform’s downfall, he explains, was thinking the internet wanted a premium show cut up into small segments, and burned through over $1 billion. Quibi got its money from Goldman Sachs, Google, Alibaba, and former DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg. “It was a good idea in retrospect, people think, but bad timing in that just … or people weren't quite ready, and the execution being too high quality,” Barnes says. Now, analysts have told Barnes that micro dramas will be a $10 billion business by 2027 — outside of China. Barnes says MicroCo plans to launch their app during the first quarter of 2026. It’s free to view the first three or four episodes of a series, then you have to buy credits to access more content. MicroCo is confident they can boost quality, and combined with their Hollywood expertise, gain a competitive advantage with viewers, Barnes reports. However, they’ll have to be careful not to make that quality that good, he notes. “The thing that's interesting to me … they're gonna have to be willing to withstand some withering looks from their fancy Hollywood friends. ‘You're making what?’ Right? There is a snoot factor that is real in Hollywood.” The lead at MicroCo is Lloyd Braun, who headed ABC Entertainment during the era of Lost and Desperate Housewives. Jana Winograde, former Showtime president, is MicroCo’s chief executive. And Susan Rovner, formerly of NBCUniversal, is the chief creative officer. Artificial intelligence is key to their business. Barnes explains that while Quibi spent $1 million on one episode lasting three to eight minutes, MicroCo believes it can spend the same amount of money on 30 episodes by using AI tools, whether to generate images or write scripts. “They insist … several times [that] humans will always be at the core of what we're doing here. And look, there are a lot of people who might be interested in creating entertainment like this, people who are out of work, for example. But also, there's now been this huge micro drama market proven. And it's not just … in Asia. Millions of Americans have downloaded these apps and are watching.”
Total Play: 0

Users also like

10+ Episodes
Bienvenido a .. 80+     6
10+ Episodes
Perdón por .. 300+     10+
200+ Episodes
La Parroquia 1K+     20+