FOX Entertainment recently announced a major investment in vertical dramas. And for this edition of MIPCOM, the company offered details about this movement, which is driven by a partnership with Holywater / My Drama, the top vertical video streaming service outside of China, to enter the rapidly expanding micro-drama market. The vertical video series category has become an $8 billion global business, with some series viewership surpassing traditional blockbuster films.
The conference was part of the first day at MIPCOM featuring Fernando Szew, President and Head of FOX Entertainment Studios, Julian Franco, President of Operations & Strategy for FOX Entertainment, and HOLYWATER Co-Founders Anatolii Kasianov and Bogdan Nesvit.
The Holywater model
Nesvit detailed Holywater’s ecosystem, which he co-founded in Ukraine. The network, which currently serves 60 million users, centers on its books platform, MyFashion, which is cited as the top independent books publishing platform outside of China. This platform is used to incubate ideas, gather data, and select the best concepts to convert into video series for the MyDrama streaming service. Also, the company has produced around 100 series and utilizes AI within its R&D unit to speed up production and pre-test content, reducing post-production time.
On the other hand, Kasianov explained the production model: ‘We own the whole cycle, we own the production, we integrate AP and VTC in there, the streaming platform’. The company can produce shows quickly, allowing them to take more risks and work extensively with digital production. Monetization is primarily subscription-based, but also allows users to pay with ‘coins’ and virtual advertising. A full series costs approximately $30.
FOX’s strategic rationale
On the Fox side, Franco commented that company’s decision to partner was largely based on the passion of the founders, viewing the agreement as a bet on the entrepreneurs. He outlined FOX’s motivation for entering the emerging format: ‘I think what makes vertical video interesting for us is it is a format that is quickly building a lot of audience’. He added, ‘What we try to do is meet them wherever they might be. And we recognize that vertical video is an emerging and very quickly developing format’.
Szew confirmed the initial plan is to produce 200 shows in partnership with Holywater for the platforms. He believes the venture aligns with FOX’s DNA for storytelling, and noted that the fast pace of production will allow them to quickly iterate and expand, taking know-how from brand’s production infrastructure. ‘We expect that kind of also at Fox in the works that I put into Fox would be a catalyst of being able to reverse engineer and really do really quickly a scale into creating these stories’, Szew said. Two shows are already shooting in Georgia.
