Live edition Vol. I · No. 32 Wednesday, 05 August 2026
Tracking 3,784 titles · Across 34 platforms · Streaming Radar  ·  the newsletter · Vertical Invasion  ·  the report

Radar

Vertical drama decoded — analysis, predictions, experiments

5 briefs 47 companies tracked 1 active prediction
Recent Intelligence
RADAR 2026-08-04
The Format Doesn't Need Its Own App, It Needs Someone Else's Bundle
Look at what launched the same week from two different directions. New Short Media announced itself alongside vertTV and...
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RADAR 2026-08-03
Everyone Is Redesigning Discovery for an Audience That Just Stopped Growing
Read the Ofcom number next to the WBD announcement and the sequence gets uncomfortable. HBO Max ships a scrollable verti...
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RADAR 2026-08-02
Nobody Bought the Prime Video Bundle to Watch a Microdrama, and That's the Point
The instinct is to read the Starz-Crunchyroll bundle and the HBO Max Shorts feed as the same story — legacy platforms fi...
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RADAR 2026-08-01
The Industry Is Building Discovery Layers on Top of a Chart Nobody Trusts
Two weeks running, the minishort consumer top ten hasn't shifted a single title, while the ad-spend chart has turned ove...
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RADAR 2026-07-31
The Consumer Chart Hasn't Moved in Two Weeks, and That's the Real Story
Look at the minishort top 10 this week against last week's: identical, title for title, rank for rank, down to the view ...
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RADAR 2026-07-30
The Same Week, Two Definitions of "Platform
Four launches inside seven days, and they can't agree on what they're building. HBO Max ships a scrollable feed and a se...
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RADAR 2026-07-29
Distribution Is Eating Discovery, and Nobody in the Room Wants to Say So Out Loud
HBO Max shipped a scrollable vertical feed and a conversational search this week, called it "enhanced content discovery,...
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RADAR 2026-07-28
The Fork Has a Sponsor Now
Two studios launched within minutes of each other on July 22, and the gap between them is the whole story. vertTV comes ...
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Premium Intelligence
🔒 ANALYSIS 2026-03-15
Hollywood pivots to vertical drama — and it's more political than creative
Why Hollywood is playing defense, not offense
8 studios · 12 deals · 10,000 words
March 2026: Google, Disney, NBCUniversal and Lifetime pile into the Chinese format they dismissed six months ago.
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Analysis reserved for Streaming Radar subscribers

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🔒 ANALYSIS 2026-03-10
The pick-and-shovel sellers of the vertical gold rush
When an app burns $1 on UA, who actually profits?
6 ad networks · $26B market · follow the money
When a mobile-drama app burns $1 to acquire a user, who actually pockets it? Spoiler: not the app.
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Analysis reserved for Streaming Radar subscribers

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The Big Picture

Vertical drama is no longer a niche. Hollywood is playing defense, the pick-and-shovel sellers are pocketing the margins, AI can't write the script yet, and the real question is: who acquires whom before end of 2026?