u/AimsH18

I've gone down a rabbit hole with werewolf and vampire verticals. Currently, my favorite vampire vertical is Bloodlust on MyDrama. Anastasia Ivaniuk and Anastasia Korol are so good together. It is holding strong as my overall favorite vertical. Love and Blood on ReelShorts is really good as well, but doesn't come close to beating Bloodlust. My favorite werewolf vertical is a tie between Luna Lola on DramaShorts and The Chosen Luna on MyDrama. All three of my top favorites star Anastasia Ivaniuk. She clearly has a thing for fantasy stories, and I'm not mad about it. She does amazing in them. Now I find myself needing some more suggestions that can match these. Preferably, if they are on MyDrama or DramaShorts, that'd be ideal, but I'm up for finding ways to watch something really good on another app. I need more to consume in this genre. The quality they produce with these is above and beyond what I was expecting from fantasy shows in verticals. Give me your best suggestions. See if any of them can top the ones I've listed.

Has anyone done the MyDrama Legend level membership on the MyDrama YouTube channel? I already have an amazing subscription deal with the main vertical website, but they have some of the shows I love in full horizontal form (at least that is what Google confirmed). I know they have some of the spicy bits edited out, but I'm so tempted to watch them in their full horizontal glory. I don't know that it's worth the current going rate of $50 per month (I'd only do it for one month because that's expensive) when I've already seen the shows just in vertical. I was hoping to find someone who has it now or had it in the past to see if they feel/felt it was worth it. I'm not sure if I'm looking for someone to talk me into doing it or out of it, lol, but I'm definitely interested in hearing from anyone who has experience with it.

I wanted to convey my thoughts on AI within microdramas and how I see the industry going. I don’t think AI is going anywhere, but I do think it will change and evolve. Microdramas became popular on the backs of talented performers and crew, which makes these apps going straight AI seem like a slap in the face, and it is. The problem is that once the big apps became popular, more came out of the woodwork to try to also capitalize. A quick Google search indicates that more than 200 of these apps exist globally. Each of these apps had to ramp up production to create their libraries. That did make for a sudden and drastic explosion of jobs, but it was never going to be sustainable. That many apps vying for production resources, when most were not well-funded, was never going to be a long-lasting boom. That left a void where the much cheaper AI productions had a chance to take hold, and they did, in a big way. That then took jobs out of the market. And, yes, that’s a bad thing, but I see the boom of jobs as an artificial bubble. It looked great in the moment, but it was always just one millisecond away from bursting. AI was just the sharp object that burst that bubble, but AI alone wasn’t the deciding factor in where things currently stand.

At the same time that AI made a surge, Hollywood money began flowing into the microdrama space. FOX Entertainment has a deal with MyDrama for 200 original verticals. FOX Entertainment and MyDrama also have a deal with Dhar Mann for an additional 40 original verticals. ReelShorts has a deal with NBC/Peacock where some of the originals are now on Peacock. While Peacock is licensing that content, they are also ramping up production of original content. Right now, the production slate seems to mostly be reality shows, but at least it’s not AI, so that’s something. Google just sponsored a vertical with Emily VanCamp and a cast of known performers. Even Google is testing the waters with a human-led production, which is a good sign. This caused another imbalance where these apps are getting Hollywood deals/money, and others that weren’t able to secure deals have struggled to maintain their pipelines in the increasingly competitive market. That forced many apps to find cheaper ways to produce content, and that is where AI really took hold. That is both a bad thing and a good thing. Bad because it cost jobs for performers and crew who were just getting to a position where they could survive strictly by doing the craft they love. Good because I think it could be an equalizer for the industry and help set it to a more stable and sustainable playing field. It’s just awful that hard-working cast and crew have been set aside as collateral damage in all of this. Someone should have seen the bubble sooner and taken action to shield this group of workers better.

With this many apps, one of three things will happen to each of them: many will fail, others will go straight AI, while those with Hollywood funding that came out of the gate early and set a sustainable pace will remain mostly human-focused. Millions of dollars exist within AI productions; the apps that go straight AI have a market for their content, and it is cheap, but I predict they will struggle in the long run. Once the dust settles, the big apps with the right deals and funding will settle at the top. Human content will always have a slight edge. It might not always be the biggest edge, especially as AI evolves, but I don’t see AI content ever overtaking human-led content. I think that is why the apps that manage to keep their content mostly human-led will have the strongest standing in the market. I could be wrong; all of this is just from my observations and familiarity with the rise and fall of the phases of the film industry, but I do feel confident in saying all of this.

I think that those of us who love the human-led content need to hold on during this turbulent time and do our part. We need to not use pirated links to watch the content we love. We only keep our favorite apps human-led and our favorite performers employed by legally watching the content. I know that many of these apps are absurdly priced. I only subscribe to MyDrama, and that’s because I got a phenomenal deal. I have a handful of apps that have mostly remained human-led that I go through nightly and do the daily rewards tasks. That way, I have a bank of coins/tickets built up so that when one drops something I want to watch, I don’t have to worry about dropping much, if any, money. The apps get the ad revenue they need while I get to legally watch and support my favorite performers without spending a fortune. We, as viewers, have more power than most think. I used to use pirated links to watch as well until I really dove into researching the industry and realized that pirated links probably played a big part in where we are today with AI. I now only use these forums to research what is out and figure out where to find that show. I have stopped viewing any pirated links for verticals. If we want human-led content to survive in the vertical space, we all need to do our best to watch this content legally so our views count. That is how we help keep AI from overtaking human-led productions.

If you made it this far in this long post, then please post your own thoughts on this topic.

I've been watching at vertical microdramas for a year or so. Just ones I could find on Daily Motion. Very casual. Very judgemental, if I'm being honest. I never watched enough to be as judgemental as I was. Most I did watch felt like poorly made college film school projects. ​The ones the companies don't even care enough about to have pulled down. But a few good ones that made me wonder. Every now and again one of those ads would intrigue me, the quality of the production looked solid, but red flag warnings about payment issues and the way the whole coin thing feels like a scam kept me from subscribing and a lot of the good ones are hard to find. Until MyDrama finally did me in last month. They released several that I wanted to watch without fighting Daily Motion. Ones I wanted to watch in HQ and support the production. I finally got brave and subscribed and I've been mostly pleased with the experience. I thought MyDrama was a fluke in a crowded landscape, but this week I've braved checking out some other platforms and most aren't bad. They aren't the college film project vibes I expected. They remind me of peak cheesy WB/CW days. The trashy stuff that is so damn bad it is good and locks you in. Some amazing performers that deserve more mainstream recognition. All of this has led me to ponder, how does the industry beat the belief that a lot of these microdrama platforms are scams/scam adjacent? ​Because this new medium is going to explode. It already is with Hollywood deals and money flowing in. But it could be/will be even bigger if they can break free of the stigma that so many of us feel/once felt about them. Do they do a big PR campaign as a collective? Do they change their subscription models to mirror modern streaming sevices? Less AI and push actual performers more? What breaks the stigma? Just curious what others think on this topic.