Short drama basics

A short drama, also called a vertical drama or micro-drama, is a serialized show shot for a phone screen. Episodes run one to two minutes and a series has dozens to over a hundred of them, so the story plays out across a long string of very short installments. Everything is framed upright, which is why the apps feel closer to a social feed than to a streaming service, and each episode ends on a hook so the next one auto-plays.

They stream in dedicated apps rather than on the general streamers. Each app carries its own library, and a show is sometimes on more than one. The stories lean on a tight set of recurring genres because the format rewards a premise that lands in the first thirty seconds.

The first several episodes are usually free and the rest unlock with coins bought in the app. That structure is why a show's full cost is hard to see up front.

Most apps do not sell episodes directly. They sell coins, sometimes split into a paid balance and a bonus balance, and each locked episode costs a set number of them. Some apps sell a subscription that unlocks content instead of, or alongside, coins.

Coins come in packages through the app store, and bigger packages usually carry more coins per dollar, so the effective price of a coin depends on which package was bought. The stores publish what a package costs but not how many coins it holds; that number lives inside the app. Several apps also charge more coins for later episodes than for earlier ones.

Many apps add bonus coins to a first top-up, which makes that first purchase cheaper per coin than any later one. A one-time bonus cannot be assumed across a whole series, so it mainly affects the low end of an estimate.

Cost to finish is the site's modeled estimate, usually a range, of what it takes to watch a show from where the free episodes stop to the finale. Paid episodes are the total minus the free ones observed; those are multiplied by the per-episode coin price and a coin rate drawn from the app's published packages. The low end assumes the best rate and no late-series escalation, the high end a smaller package and the escalation seen on that platform.

An estimate older than 90 days is pulled rather than shown stale. The full model, and a calculator, are on the cost calculator page.