RoseBerry Media to Recut 'Neighbours' Into Microdramas for Epis

In a statement about the project, RoseBerry cofounder and CEO Guy Hameiri called Neighbours an iconic piece of television history that is well suited to vertical viewing through the company's proprietary, AI-powered production workflow. Hameiri said he believes the project will show how premium vertical television can become a significant new entertainment category and help introduce new audiences to a classic series.

The Verge notes that Variety's framing of RoseBerry's vertical cut as a microdrama is curious. Microdramas are short-form vertical videos that often feature characters caught up in convoluted romance plots, which gives them some subject-matter overlap with Neighbours. But unlike network television shows with sizable budgets, microdramas are produced cheaply and made specifically for mobile consumption. They also tend to follow a narrative formula that opens with intrigue and closes on melodramatic cliffhangers, making the format feel like a storytelling genre of its own.

Over the past year, entertainment trade reporting has made it seem as though Hollywood is ready to go all in on microdramas, and that such projects could bring much-needed production work back to Los Angeles. It is unclear whether Variety's phrasing reflects a changing industry definition or studios' use of a buzzword to generate hype. If microdramas become a key part of Hollywood's future, The Verge argues, there should be a general understanding of what they actually are.

The money spent on Neighbours and the quality of its cast's acting make it a different kind of entertainment from the microdramas that have become hits for companies such as ReelShort and DramaBox. RoseBerry's approach is closer to what Tattle TV did earlier this year with Alfred Hitchcock's silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, and what startup Snips is doing with series like Big Brother and MasterChef. There may be an audience for those projects, but grouping them with campy, bite-sized series such as Forbidden Fling With My Bestie's Dad, which helped define and popularize microdramas in the West, is somewhat disingenuous.

Microdramas originated in China and began gaining traction around 2018 on platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, both TikTok analogs. Kuaishou's Unexpectedness, a satirical comedy about a man struggling to achieve his goals, was one of the first Chinese microseries to make a splash. As social video platforms embraced e-commerce, brands began to see microdramas as a viable way to market products to viewers. As audiences grew, more Chinese film and TV production studios began producing microdramas. By 2021, revenue from short-form video was projected to hit $500 million, a figure expected to reach $7 billion by 2024 and $16.2 billion by 2030.

Though microdramas in all languages tend to be seen as lower-quality entertainment, their core appeal is fairly easy to grasp. The series lean heavily on established narrative tropes, and their stories are usually designed to leave viewers guessing about the outlandish twists ahead. Their vertical format and minute-long segments make them content meant to be consumed through a phone screen. Their relatively small production budgets also positioned them as a viable way for up-and-coming actors and filmmakers to book consistent work.

In recent months, that promise has been waylaid by the spread of generative artificial intelligence. In China especially, generative AI has had a devastating impact on the microdrama economy for human actors: 95 percent of Chinese microdramas produced in the first three months of this year were created with AI, leading to fewer jobs and lower pay. A similar story is playing out in Hollywood, where actors have reported being pressured by studios to sign over rights to their digital likenesses. Though the details differ, presenting repurposed films and TV series as microdramas poses a similar threat to people working in the business.