RoseBerry's Epis Wants to Be the Streaming Service for the Phone-First Generation

There's a new streaming service in town, and it's designed to be watched the way most people already watch everything — vertically, on a phone, in whatever pocket of time they can find. RoseBerry Media launched Epis this week, billing it as the world's first premium vertical streaming service. That "world's first" label is RoseBerry's own characterization, but the ambition behind it is real enough.

Epis — short for "episodes" — is launching with more than 100 titles spanning reality TV, true crime, and drama. The content isn't starting from scratch either. RoseBerry has signed deals with some serious players in the international TV rights world: Fremantle, Banijay, All3Media, A+E Global Media, and Cineflix Rights are all on board to repurpose library titles for vertical viewing.

What that looks like in practice: a Channel 4 true crime miniseries from 2024, *The Fall: Skydive Murder*, gets reformatted and relaunched on Epis as *You Can't Kill Me*. A Channel 5 thriller from 2023 called *Heat* — the one starring Danny Dyer — becomes *House in Flames*. All3Media and Lion Television's dating format *Sexy Beasts*, which aired on BBC 3 and Netflix, is also in the mix. These aren't obscure titles being quietly recycled. They're proven IP being rebuilt for a different screen orientation and a different viewing context.

The platform is also positioning itself well beyond just a content destination. CEO and co-founder Guy Hameiri described it as a testing and data platform for the vertical format itself. "It gives us and our partners a DTC destination, a testing and data analysis ground and a source of audience intelligence," he said, "while supporting a broader studio model designed to help the industry create, understand and monetise premium vertical television across multiple distribution windows." The implication being that Epis isn't just trying to attract subscribers — it's trying to generate the kind of audience data that could eventually inform deals with larger platforms. Netflix Clips and Disney+ Verts have been floated as potential licensing destinations, though no confirmed deals with either exist at this point.

RoseBerry is also planning more than 25 original vertical productions for 2026, though that remains a stated intention rather than a completed slate.

To mark the launch, RoseBerry appointed Gidon Katz — the veteran TV executive credited with launching both Peacock and Now TV — to its advisory board. No quote from Katz accompanied the announcement.

The service is explicitly trying to carve out space above the microdrama apps that have proliferated in recent years. ReelShort, DramaBox, and FreeFlow are the names Epis is distancing itself from — the implication being that vertical mobile content doesn't have to mean cheap or disposable. Hameiri put it plainly: "Audiences have changed how they consume content, but they have not stopped wanting great stories."

Whether Epis can actually deliver on the "premium" promise at scale is the real question. The content partnerships are credible, the advisory board hire is credible, and the market logic — that phone-native viewing habits aren't going anywhere — is hard to argue with. The execution is what remains to be seen.

[Original Source](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/roseberry-epis-vertical-streamer-fremantle-all3media-format-1236646374/)