One-minute-long soap operas taking over social media
Entertainment
Featuring soap-opera like series with episodes as short as a minute long
(Web Desk) - A new medium for TV shows is taking over social media — and they're shorter than ever before.
A quickly-growing app called ReelShort is currently looking to make its entrance into the American entertainment system, after being popularized in Asia during the pandemic.
Avid Lifetime channel watchers may be familiar with this type of content already.
The soap opera-like productions feature small casts of lesser-known actors and titles like The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband or Bound by Vendetta: Sleeping With the Enemy.
These shows also differ from their mainstream competitors — like Netflix or other streamers — in one specific way: episodes are as short as one minute long and are meant to cater to TikTok users and Gen Z.
Owned by Northern California-based company Crazy Maple Studio (which is backed by the Beijing-based publisher COL Group, per the New York Times), ReelShort has made over $22 million in revenue as of last December.
According to Joey Jia, the studio's chief executive, ReelShort tries to pack in as much action into the first few episodes of a show to keep audiences hooked — then, ReelShort users are forced to switch from TikTok to the company's mobile app, and watch ads or pay for the series to keep watching.
"This is a pay as you go model. If people are confused by the story, they leave," Jia told the Times, noting that some users pay as much as $10 to $20 to keep watching a show they're invested in. "Isn’t that a crazy business?"
According to the executive, the studio's audience is three-quarters women, and they aren't trying to compete with companies like Netflix (or Quibi, the short-lived horizontal streaming service that produced shows with major celebs before shutting down in 2020).
"We are using a very different business model and serving a different time," he said, noting that ReelShort shows are meant to be watched while waiting in line, moments in between work or in the bathroom.
This bite-sized content isn't unfamiliar to TikTok and other social media platform users, either — shows like Young Sheldon and The Sopranos, as well as movies like the original Mean Girls, get split up into short clips and subsequently go viral.
