Hollywood fears AI might threaten prestige films and award-season scripts. The first real shift is happening somewhere else. The fastest-growing category in filmed entertainment is the one-minute vertical soap opera, the micro-drama. Viewers enter these stories the way they enter social feeds, without intention or commitment. They consume them in short stacks, often ten or more episodes at a time, with average session lengths on leading apps exceeding twenty minutes. The content is designed for idle moments. It is built to be forgettable. That structure makes it an early candidate for full automation. If viewers cannot tell the difference, there is no difference.
South Korea’s Vigloo is a microdrama streaming app backed by eighty-six million dollars from Krafton Inc., the gaming company behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, and operated by Spoon Labs, which originally built an audio livestreaming service. Vigloo has released two full-length vertical dramas created almost entirely with AI video models. CEO Neil Choi said in an interview that the company focuses on speed and consistency. “We do not care whether it is live action or AI. We use whatever delivers the story the fastest.” The AI-produced titles, I Met a Savior in Hell and Seoul 2053, were produced by four-person teams using widely available AI video production tools like Google Imagen, and Bytedance’s SeedDream, along with automated dubbing and lip-sync for localization. Choi said the company now plans to release one such series per month.
Inside Vigloo, production is treated as a moving target. Yeonsoo Choi, who leads the company’s AI efforts, said the method changes every few weeks as new models become available and older steps are replaced. The process resembles software iteration more than filmmaking. Vigloo launched with forty titles in July. It now carries more than three hundred fifty and has added English-language originals for the United States.
Los Angeles- based producer Mier Liu heads U.S. operations for Swiss Media, which creates series for micro-streaming apps like ReelShorts. Liu said a typical sixty-minute micro-drama costs between two hundred and two hundred fifty thousand dollars and is shot in seven or eight days. “We are not SAG,” he said. “Our lead actors get fifteen hundred to twenty-four hundred dollars per day.” Crews, locations, wardrobe, and postproduction bring the cost to roughly three thousand dollars per finished minute. Liu said she expects AI to begin integrating AI to reduce expenses. “We plan to apply it to bring down the cost even more.” She compared the format to early reality television. “People laughed at it. Everyone watched.”
Still from the AI generated Holywater streaming series, “Queen of Hearts.”
Holywater
Ukraine-based Holywater shows the same trend on a different scale. Founder Bogdan Nesvit said the company produces two-to-three-minute episodes for well under twenty thousand dollars per sixty minute series using a mix of generative tools, including Runway, LTX Studio, and ElevenLabs. Fox Entertainment has taken a strategic stake to co-produce two hundred titles for Western markets. Nesvit described the operation as a testing environment rather than a traditional studio. “We are a content laboratory,” he told me.
These companies share similar production DNA. Spoon Labs, Vigloo’s parent, comes from audio livestreaming. Holywater’s engineering team previously built automated advertising and game systems. Liu’s company works as an outsourced production vendor for multiple micro-drama apps. None are structured like Hollywood studios. They are software-driven businesses optimizing output and responsiveness.
