The $26 Billion Entertainment Industry You Can Watch in 90 Seconds

Salutations, Olio aficionados! 👋

Welcome to the 288th edition of Weekly Olio. We’re thrilled to introduce a fresh new twist to your Sundays: Publisher Parmesan, our hand-picked, thoughtfully crafted edition designed to spark inspiration and insights for the week ahead.

It’s the perfect way to unwind, recharge, and prepare for the week with something truly worth savoring.

If you’re new here and you’re looking for more long-form, crispy writing, click the link to subscribe under this GIF 👇

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

What if the future of television doesn't look like television at all?

It may arrive vertically on your phone, one to three minutes at a time, with a cliffhanger at the end of every episode and another episode waiting immediately behind it.

That is the world of micro-dramas, a format that began in China and has quietly become a global entertainment phenomenon. Nearly 700 million people in China watched micro-dramas last year, while the global industry generated approximately $11 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach $26 billion by 2030.

The format has already attracted Hollywood's attention. It is appearing on TikTok, Instagram and dedicated apps, while major media companies are experimenting with vertical storytelling.

But there is a twist.

The technology that could make micro-dramas enormously profitable may also destroy the economics that made them interesting in the first place. AI can reportedly cut production costs by as much as 90%, but it can also replace actors, directors and crews while flooding platforms with increasingly repetitive content.

So the real question isn't whether micro-dramas are the next big thing.

It's whether an entertainment business built on more stories, produced faster and consumed more quickly can survive when AI makes stories almost infinitely cheap to produce.

The appeal of micro-dramas becomes clearer when you stop comparing them with traditional television.

A typical series asks for a significant commitment. A movie requires two hours. A television episode can take 45 minutes. Even a streaming series expects viewers to set aside an evening.

Micro-dramas ask for almost nothing.

A typical series can contain 50 to 90 episodes, but each episode may last only one to three minutes. The entire story can therefore be consumed in roughly an hour, often in tiny fragments throughout the day.

The format is particularly well suited to the way people already use their phones. A commuter has ten minutes. Someone waiting for a meeting has five. A worker has a short break. Instead of beginning a movie that requires sustained attention, they can watch three episodes of a story and stop whenever they want.

The storytelling is deliberately optimized for this behavior. Every episode contains a hook, an emotional beat or a cliffhanger designed to push the viewer into the next one.

It is sometimes described as "dopamine storytelling."

That may sound dismissive.

From a business perspective, it is exceptionally efficient storytelling.

Micro-dramas emerged in China in the late 2010s, often adapting popular web novels into short serialized videos. The pandemic accelerated the format as consumers spent more time on their phones and became increasingly comfortable with vertical video through platforms such as Douyin.

Then distribution solved the industry's biggest problem.

Rather than asking consumers to discover micro-dramas independently, platforms could place snippets directly into their social feeds. A compelling 60-second scene became an advertisement for the rest of the series. Viewers who wanted to know what happened next were pushed toward dedicated apps.

The model was simple: give away enough of the story to create curiosity, then monetize the remaining episodes through subscriptions, in-app purchases or advertising.

The scale eventually became enormous.

Nearly 700 million people in China, roughly half the population, watched micro-dramas last year. The industry generated more revenue than China's entire movie box office for two consecutive years.

But success created its own problem.

The domestic market became crowded.

Chinese production companies began looking overseas, launching hundreds of apps and producing content specifically for international audiences. By early last year, more than 200 micro-drama apps had launched outside China.

The format had stopped being a Chinese phenomenon.

It had become an export industry.

The global numbers explain why investors and media companies are paying attention.

Micro-drama app downloads rose approximately 140% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, while average daily time spent on micro-drama apps reached around 25 minutes by April. That is beginning to approach the roughly 35 minutes people spend each day on traditional streaming platforms.

But globalizing the format has revealed an important complication.

Audiences don't monetize equally.

In the US and other developed markets, consumers may be willing to pay substantial subscription fees. In some cases, micro-drama subscriptions can approach $40 a month, which is more expensive than premium Netflix.

In Southeast Asia, India and Latin America, users are generally more comfortable watching advertisements in exchange for continuing to watch.

That forces the industry to make a strategic choice.

Should it pursue fewer high-value customers who pay more, or hundreds of millions of users who pay almost nothing but generate advertising revenue?

The answer increasingly appears to be the latter.

The industry's center of gravity is moving from high-value markets toward high-volume markets.

And that makes production economics critical.

Get revenue agents, workflows, and automations across every stage of your motion. Access customer data in real time through Attio's web app, MCP, API, and SDK.

Then Ask Attio anything about your business and get instant answers.

It's the CRM that runs the work behind every win.

Try Attio Now

This is where the micro-drama story becomes much more interesting.

The industry needs to produce an extraordinary amount of content. A single series may require 50 to 90 episodes, and platforms need thousands of titles to keep audiences engaged.

Traditionally, that meant actors, directors, writers, editors, camera crews and production teams.

AI is beginning to remove many of those constraints.

Chinese production companies are already using AI to write scripts, generate actors, assist with production and predict where audiences may lose interest. One producer described the ambition of predicting audience fatigue with such precision that a platform could identify the exact point in an episode where viewers were likely to become bored and insert a new twist.

The economics are even more striking.

Kunlun Tech says AI has helped reduce production costs by as much as 90%, turning a series that once cost around $200,000 into one that could cost less than $20,000.

ReelShort, already on track to generate more than $1 billion in revenue, expects AI-generated production to account for more than 90% of its content by 2027.

For investors, that sounds almost irresistible.

Lower costs. More content. More experimentation. More languages. More markets.

But there is a dangerous second-order effect.

If everyone can produce dramatically more content, audiences may drown in it.

This is the paradox at the heart of AI-powered entertainment.

The cheaper it becomes to make content, the less valuable content itself becomes.

Micro-dramas already operate on a formula: dramatic opening, emotional escalation, cliffhanger, repeat. AI can make that formula faster and cheaper, but it cannot guarantee that audiences will continue caring about it.

There are already signs of fatigue. Some viewers prefer AI-generated aesthetics, particularly younger audiences accustomed to digitally native content. Others find the visuals overly smooth, artificial or robotic.

The human cost is even harder to ignore.

Actors, directors and crew members who found new opportunities in micro-dramas during the Hollywood strikes are now seeing those opportunities disappear as AI-generated productions increase.

This creates an unusual situation.

The same technology that makes the industry more scalable could make the industry less attractive for the people who built it.

And if AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from the human-made version, the competitive advantage shifts again.

The scarce resource is no longer production.

It is discovery.

Traditional media companies are paying attention because micro-dramas have survived long enough to become difficult to dismiss.

NBCUniversal's Peacock has launched a dedicated vertical-video feed. Fox is experimenting with turning traditional television programming into episodes shorter than two minutes. Hollywood studios that once viewed the category as a novelty are now studying the economics.

But they have a reason to be cautious.

In 2020, Hollywood and Silicon Valley launched Quibi, a service built around short-form serialized content designed specifically for smartphones. It raised nearly $2 billion and collapsed in less than a year.

The lesson wasn't necessarily that people don't want short-form entertainment.

Quibi may simply have arrived too early.

Consumers had not yet spent years training themselves to scroll through vertical video. Quibi also spent enormous amounts of money producing premium content for a format that had not yet established demand.

Micro-dramas have taken the opposite approach.

They are cheap. They are fast. They use existing social-media behavior.

And they have already demonstrated that people will consume them.

The question for Hollywood is therefore not whether micro-dramas can work.

It is whether traditional entertainment companies can learn the economics without destroying what makes the format work.

Every entertainment revolution begins by changing the answer to a simple question: how much time are people willing to give us?

Movies asked for two hours.

Television asked for an evening.

Streaming asked for a season.

Micro-dramas ask for 90 seconds.

That may sound like a small difference. It isn't. It represents a fundamental change in the relationship between audiences and stories.

And now AI is accelerating that change by making production dramatically cheaper.

But investors should be careful about confusing lower production costs with higher economic value.

When content becomes abundant, the content itself becomes less scarce. What becomes scarce is attention, trust, discovery and stories that feel different from everything else on the screen.

That is the paradox of the micro-drama boom.

The industry may be heading toward a world where anyone can produce a show for $20,000, publish thousands of episodes a year and distribute them to hundreds of millions of people.

But when everyone can make a story, the most valuable company may be the one that knows which story you should watch next.

That is where the next billion-dollar entertainment battle may actually be fought.

Missed reading the recent editions? Check out our previous coverage here:

Your 2027 budget is almost finalized, and the clock is ticking to hire your new agency partner for next year.

An agency search takes this long:

That's over 5 months wasted, so an agency hired in January doesn't deliver results until May.

Vendry helps you hire the best agency for your business, ASAP.

Describe the brief, we do the shortlisting, and your search begins tomorrow.

Tell us what you need and we'll send 3 or 4 vetted agencies matched to your budget and category in <7 days.

Start Your Free Search

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this edition, we’d really appreciate if you shared it with a friend, family member or colleague.

We’ll be back in your inbox 2 PM IST next Sunday. Till then, have a productive week!

Peeyush and Mohit

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.