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Allison Reichel

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Alan Mruvka’s vertical video platform Verza TV is already moving beyond verticals. Not that it’s leaving the portrait-mode shorts format behind.

Verza TV, founded by the cofounder of E! Entertainment Television, just launched in December. Today, what the company is internally calling “Verza 2.0” is upon us, which includes horizontal videos and a complete shift to user-generated content, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. So, yeah, YouTube + YouTube Shorts, essentially, just on a much, much smaller level. (To be fair, compared with YouTube, even Netflix is on a much smaller level.) Verza TV is positioning itself as “the digital theatre for the next generation,” and says this transition will make the mobile-first platform scalable.

At launch, Verza licensed 80 Singapore-made microdramas from an international distribution company. It was something of a strange choice for the first U.S.-based (at the time of announcement, at least) microdrama platform.

“Verza was built on the idea that the future of entertainment is mobile, immersive, and accessible,” Mruvka said in a statement. “By evolving into a creator-driven ecosystem, we’re empowering the next generation of storytellers while maintaining the premium quality audiences expect. We are building the digital theatre for the next generation.”

There’s that tagline again. Mruvka is presenting Verza 2.0 at the NAB Show in Las Vegas.

Verza says adding traditional horizontal formats on the platform is “a first for the microdrama category.” Going fully UGC will not impact production quality, Verza says, and creators will be able to check their monetization stats in real-time.

Vertical videos, colloquially called “microdramas” (even though they’re sometimes comedies), are the newest trend in Hollywood, though most of the content comes from China (or the Ukraine, in Holywater’s case). Time will tell if the trend is more of a fad.

For now, the space is getting crowded. There are the major incumbents like ReelShort and DramaBox, as well as upstart companies from Hollywood veterans including MicroCo and GammaTime.

Microdramas are generally cheaply made dramas dubbed and diced up into roughly 60-second slices, though the details can vary by platform. These mobile apps tend to offer the first few “episodes” for free, hoping to hook a viewer, and then charge a user to finish the story.

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