"The latest player in the vertical video production world has come to the table, and it marks a significant moment for television’s international program distributors.
This new company Roseberry Media will focus on production and distributing “high-quality, mass appeal premium content for vertical television era,” but more notably it debuts with deals in place to repurpose library content from several international distribution businesses who have to this point largely avoided the microdrama and vertical video world.
RoseBerry launches today with a string of deals in place with the likes of A+E Global Media, All3Media International, Banijay Rights, Cineflix Rights and Fremantle.
The content deals will see select shows from each distributor repurposed as vertical videos using a proprietary AI-powered technology and workflow.
The process has been dubbed ‘library verticalization,’ which hopes to to unlock value from existing IP and content libraries in the vertical space.
While no specific programs have been named in the deals, reports are that genres covered include documentary; true crime, including U.S. productions; reality, including “vertically-native” formats from the U.S.; and some scripted content."
This is obviously fairly large news, as it's the first official move seen by players in the Vertical space to chopshop existing, already-produced content and repurpose of Vertical format (with the assistance of AI, because of course!).
While it seems they're starting with the low hanging fruit of docs, reality TV, and the like, it's hard to imagine "library verticalization" is going to suddenly disappear now that Pandora's box has been opened.
Can't wait to watch The Godfather is 3-minute paywalled increments on my leased-monthly iPhone 22 in the years to come.
(https://deadline.com/2026/05/vertical-video-roseberry-media-launch-tv-di...)
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Pat Alexander This honestly feels like one of those moments where the industry quietly shifts direction before most people fully realize the long-term implications.
On one hand, I understand why distributors are interested. Libraries are expensive assets sitting on massive amounts of underutilized content, and vertical platforms have proven there’s a huge mobile-first audience consuming stories in short bursts. From a business perspective, “library verticalization” probably feels inevitable.
But creatively, it raises some uncomfortable questions.
A lot of films and series were composed, edited, framed, paced, and emotionally structured specifically for horizontal cinematic viewing. Cropping and restructuring them into vertical micro-content fundamentally changes the language of the work. Sometimes that adaptation might work surprisingly well especially for reality, docs, or highly dialogue-driven material but other times it risks turning carefully crafted storytelling into fragmented content consumption.
What’s especially interesting is the role AI is playing here. We’re moving from AI assisting production to AI actively reshaping and reformatting existing art for new consumption habits. That’s a very different conversation.
I don’t think vertical storytelling itself is the problem. Some creators are doing genuinely innovative things with the format. The bigger concern is whether the industry starts optimizing stories primarily around attention retention instead of cinematic intention.
The “Godfather in 3-minute increments” joke is funny partly because it doesn’t feel impossible anymore.
So well put Abhijeet Aade. If this is the tip of the iceberg, there are MANY more uncomfortable questions to be raised. And your point about consumption habit -maxxing is key. The business side seems okay to give into the lowest common denominators and feed humanities worst impulses, instead of you know - fighting, or even trying at this point, to be better and work harder to capture audience attention spans, while audiences repeatedly exhibit one very clear behavior - if you make something truly great, they will show up for it. But of course that's too hard when compared to clicking one button and letting AI work it's tragic magic
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Pat this is the part most writers will not see coming. Library verticalization turns finished work into raw material for an AI repackaging pipeline. Most older distribution deals do not contemplate algorithmic reshaping into short vertical cuts. The reuse rights language is set for broadcast and streaming. The pay structure was written for a use case that no longer exists. Are any of these RoseBerry deals retroactive on existing library content where the original creators have a vote?
Pat Alexander Exactly and I think that’s the part people often ignore when discussing AI in entertainment: audiences haven’t actually stopped responding to quality.
When something feels genuinely original, emotionally honest, or artistically ambitious, people still show up for it in massive numbers. We’ve seen that repeatedly. The issue is that originality takes risk, patience, taste, and real creative effort and those are much harder to scale than fast, algorithm-friendly content.
What worries me isn’t AI itself as a tool. It’s the possibility of industries becoming increasingly comfortable optimizing for speed, familiarity, and passive consumption instead of meaningful storytelling.
Because eventually you don’t just train algorithms you train audiences too.
And once everything becomes engineered around instant stimulation and lowest-effort engagement, it becomes harder for slower, stranger, more emotionally challenging work to survive in mainstream spaces.
But ironically, that may also make truly human storytelling even more valuable and noticeable when it appears.
Eric Charran that's EXACTLY the issue - most contracts have no stipulation for clipping/library verticalization. i mean 10 years ago, there was no risk of a single frame from a show becoming a meme. Now we see dozens every day. Is anyone compensated? Nope. It's just positive publicity/PR/marketing! Like everything else, we'll be 10 years behind the curve - and the curve is starting right now. Artists aren't protected. No one is protected. And when it's not in the contract, it's always open to interpretation by the law (aka a panel of judges who can be bought and sold). Creators have no say - unless they had smart lawyers who could see the future or at least plan for contingencies, at the time of contract signing. Not a great trend emerging tbh
Pat the part that scares me is the AI workflow does not just cut. It learns. A studio piping a library through this pipeline ends up with a model that understands those shows structurally. The output cuts are the visible thing. The underlying model is the invisible asset nobody named in the original deal. Writers can fight for a clipping clause in new contracts starting now. The retroactive piece is harder and it needs collective action not individual negotiation.
Pat Alexander I think that’s exactly the tension a lot of people are feeling right now.
Audiences haven’t stopped responding to great storytelling if anything, the success of films and shows that genuinely connect proves people are still hungry for work with vision, craft, and emotional depth. But creating something truly memorable takes time, risk, and patience, which is much harder than optimizing purely for speed and volume.
And honestly, I think people can sense the difference. Even when audiences can’t articulate it directly, there’s usually a feeling when something was made with genuine perspective versus assembled for efficiency.
What worries me most isn’t necessarily AI itself, but the possibility of industries lowering their creative standards because fast, disposable content becomes “good enough.” That’s where things become culturally flattening over time.
At the same time, I also think this could make distinctive human voices stand out even more strongly in the long run.