Europe has its latest microdrama platform, Snäxx.
The service, which has been in the works for some time, has the backing of Germany vertical video business Black Forest Studios and a board of “top-level” media, entertainment, technology and investment industry execs. Earlier this year, we reported Station 19 actor Boris Kodjoe was among the app’s advisors.
The service will launch on November 1 on iOS and Android and claims to be “Europe’s first premium microdrama platform.” Others may dispute that title having launched services in the likes of the UK and France, but Black Forest is attempting to position it differently.
What its founders claim sets it apart is Snäxx is not being positioned purely as a short-form app, but as building part of “a new European content ecosystem.” As we outlined earlier this year, the plan is to eschew low-cost mobile-first productions from outside Europe and replace them with higher-end stories that have “European creativity” and “global ambition.”
We also reported back in January that the app would launch with 16 completed series such as Black Forest Royale, about the life of an aristocratic German-American patchwork family in a castle in the Black Forest, high-speed thriller Guts and Mountain Medical, a drama similar to German series Schwarzwald Klinik.
At launch, Snäxx will have original productions and “selected content from independent producers, studios and rights holders.”
Black Forest, which operates a huge production studio out of Freiburg, claims Snäxx will have a ‘dual format’ strategy meaning content can play vertically on mobile and in 16:9 for television, streaming and other horizontal services. The app’s makers add this means it “represents more than any other outlet.”
Snäxx is now “actively” inviting European and international producers, distributors and rights holders to pitch in their microdrama content.
“Europe has extraordinary writers, producers, actors, studios and IP,” said Sebastian Weiland, co-founder of Snäxx and Black Forest Studios. “What has been missing is a platform built specifically to turn that creative strength into premium mobile entertainment.”
Black Forest Studios was built as one of Europe’s first production houses specifically for microdrama. The operation allows producers to develop, produce and post-produce, and deliver projects in-house, with “AI-supported workflows and a highly-efficient production pipeline designed specifically for serialized short-form storytelling.”
The final element to the Snäxx model is being billed a ‘Re:Format’, where broadcasters, distributors, studios and produces sitting on film or TV content can have them repurposed for the vertical platform.
Hernan Lopez’s Owl & Co. recently valued the vertical video space at $150M, excluding China, where the medium originated.
