The latest player in the vertical video game production world has come to the table, and it marks a significant moment for television’s international program distributors.
A group of seasoned TV, tech and investment executives, including Abot Hameiri founder Guy Hamieri, have formed RoseBerry Media. Also part of the RoseBerry founding team is ex-Amagi executive Lior Friedman and entrepreneurs and investors Itay Koppel and Simi Efrati. Headquarters are in New York, with creative and tech hubs in London and Tel Aviv.
The company 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 latter of which owns Hameiri’s Israeli production house Abot Hameiri, best known for Netflix drama Shtisel and for local versions of The X Factor, Got Talent and Survivor. Plans are also afoot for a direct-to-consumer platform launching this summer.
The content deals will see select shows from each distributor repurposed as vertical videos using a proprietary AI-powered technology and workflow RoseBerry has developed.
The process has been dubbed ‘library verticalization,’ which Roseberry claims positions it as a “key partner for industry players looking to unlock value from existing IP and content libraries in the vertical space.”
To this point, distributors have largely kept their vertical video powder dry, with key choosing to strike deals with players in the space. While no specific programs have been named in the deals, we hear genres covered include documentary; true crime, including U.S. productions; reality, including “vertically-native” formats from the U.S.; and scripted.
Our feature ahead of the London TV Screenings pointed to the conspicuous lack of dealmaking between vertical video producers and distributors, with one source saying at the time, “This is a platform play. The question is, can it be a distribution play as well?”
Looks like it can, and Hameiri – who exited Abot Hameiri in December 2024 – is certainly among the proponents.
“By combining decades of television experience with advanced AI‑driven workflows, we’re building a scalable model that delivers brand‑safe, advertiser‑ready content which we believe will represent real value globally for our industry partners and our direct-to-consumer customers when we launch our App this summer,” he said.