Illia Berestovskyi

CRO @ HOLYWATER. Building MyDrama — #1 non-Chinese-owned shortdrama platform. AI-native. Prev CPO @ Kiss My Apps ($5M → $200M ARR).

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

@ChristophZeizel Great breakdown - you clearly know this market. Would love to connect; feels like our teams might have some interesting ground to explore together. 🙌

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

@WonderStudiosX Incredible evening - The Trials is something else. Honoured to have been in the room. Onwards. 🚀

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

Another major studio going all-in on AI short-form. This space is moving faster than anyone predicted - and we’re right in the middle of it

[Variety @Variety]

Lionsgate has taken an equity stake in the generative AI video company Runway and plans to pull from its existing catalogue of franchises for an AI short-form series.

https://t.co/Vq7YBt4Yaz

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

4 days ago a piece of news dropped that most people scrolled right past.

it's one of the most important signals yet of where entertainment is heading. 👇

Fox took a full season of a primetime network reality show — Farmer Wants a Wife S3 — and re-cut it into 101 vertical micro-episodes (~1-2 min each) for MyDrama, our microdrama app at HolyWater.

read that again. a major US broadcast network. taking premium primetime IP. and rebuilding it natively for a vertical, mobile-first format.

this has never happened before. and it's probably the biggest IP ever released in the US microdrama space.

a few things that make this bigger than it looks:

→ it's not a re-upload, it's a re-edit. 11 hour-long episodes were comprehensively restructured into 101 episodes to preserve the arcs, romance and cliffhangers — but paced for mobile. format-native storytelling, not repurposed content.

→ TV and mobile are converging in real time. tonight Fox airs the S4 finale on linear TV — with a QR code on screen. scan it, get free coins, binge all of S3 vertically on MyDrama. broadcast television driving app installs. let that sink in.

→ this is Fox's first move into UNSCRIPTED vertical. until now microdrama was almost entirely scripted romance. reality TV already runs on the same fuel — emotional stakes, relationships, cliffhangers. it was always a natural fit.

→ the market is no longer "emerging". vertical video is a ~$150B market in 2026 — roughly 80% the size of all of SVOD. it was $54B in 2024. that's ~3x in two years.

my favorite framing i heard recently: microdramas are to vertical video what soap operas were to television in the 1950s — the breakout genre of a brand-new medium, not the ceiling of it. Survivor came ~50 years after the first soap opera. this time the cycle is compressing into years.

"Vertical storytelling is becoming an important new entertainment medium," as Fox Entertainment's EVP Tony Vassiliadis told @Variety. when the company behind some of the biggest shows on linear TV says that — and backs it with their own IP — that's not a trend piece. that's the industry repositioning.

most people missed this news. they won't miss what comes after it.

more established IPs are going vertical. soon. 📲

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

@gorkem I'm interested

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

Love what you’re building here Jenny - the cinematography quality is seriously impressive for AI-generated.

I’m Chief R&D Officer at HOLYWATER TECH - one of the biggest vertical drama platforms globally, partnered with FOX Entertainment. Always scouting for creators pushing AI filmmaking forward.

Do you have any longer-form work or sequences I could check out? Would love to see more of what you do.

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

@WonderStudiosX and here's the office itself. an actual converted church. just an absolute weapon of a space 🔥 pics don't even do it justice

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

Got an early look at The Trials at @WonderStudiosX ' Beyond the Loop S2 last night.
it's next-level. when this drops publicly, people are going to be floored. 🤯

a few things that stuck with me 👇
→ this isn't an "AI = faster & cheaper" story. the models got ~65% of the way — the human team carried it over the line. human-centric IS the moat.
→ TV & film: ~61% of video consumption in 2019 → under 50% today. short-form ate the rest.
→ the next generation of IP isn't born in cinemas. it's born on YouTube & TikTok.
→ tools are getting commoditised. the edge now = community + characters + distribution-native storytelling.

AI lowers the cost of that first spark of IP. what you build around it is everything.
special thanks to @Justin Hackney for a genuinely inspiring talk 🙏

oh and their office is inside a converted church. an office. in a church. we might have to steal that one at HOLYWATER TECH

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

Was in the room at Cannes for this presentation. Huge moment - and not isolated.

At HolyWater (largest non-Chinese vertical series producer, $ M+ revenue) we're already shipping fully AI-generated content. House of David just confirms what we see daily: the shift is real.

What surprised me at Cannes though - most industry reps were aggressively defensive about AI, denying the future is already here.

This is the GPT-3 moment of video. Not perfect, but enough. About to disrupt video the way AI disrupted software dev ~12 months ago.

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

a16z partner @venturetwins posted the AI Short Drama Market Map.
HOLYWATER TECH + our AI platform My Muse are on it.
creation tools next. stay tuned 🙏

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Quibi!

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

@shonaal @shiri_shh Sure, just DM me :)

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

Fair question. It's not about being anti-anyone - Chinese studios shaped this category and have real structural advantages: deeper capital, longer payback horizons, scale on the platform side. Massive respect.

Where we fit: Western studios, advertisers, and distribution partners. Content licensing, IP, payments, and data are easier to align with a Western-based operator. "Non-Chinese" is just the shortest signal for that audience. The fact that we're competing at the same level on content with very different unit economics says more about our team than about anyone else.

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

Thanks for the shoutout — happy to add color from inside the space.

Some players already pull 50%+ of traffic from fully AI-generated series. Our share is double-digit and climbing fast. Living this daily as CRO at HOLYWATER — #1 non-Chinese microdrama platform.

What most miss: it's not one product, it's a portfolio across the AI spectrum.
→ My Passion: AI writes most of our romance novels. Thousands of plots tested monthly — winners feed series.
→ My Muse: 100% AI-produced series (no real shooting). Past 7-figure MRR.
→ My Drama: human production for premium catalog.

Moat isn't picking AI or human. It's running both — at scale — today.

Wild watching this from Cannes on the last day — most film execs still debate "if AI changes entertainment" while we're already scaling the production stack.

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

@mikefutia ADS

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

@cabb08 Ось мій список в Google Maps, закладів де люблю снідати)

Breakfast · Illia
https://t.co/dd2WRK3L5E

[Illia Berestovskyi @berestovskyi]

@uklon Дякую за цей рік)