Strategy
The Founder Who Sold Wondery to Amazon Thinks Hollywood Is Sleeping on a $100B Medium
Film needed decades to mature into a global industry. Television needed decades to be treated as more than film’s smaller screen. Hernan Lopez, the founder who built Wondery into one of the leading independent podcast companies before selling it to Amazon, thinks vertical video is on the same arc, just faster, and with an ecosystem already generating an estimated $100 billion annually.
On June 3, Hernan will host the Vertical Media Summit at the W Hollywood, a half-day event organized through Owl & Co, his Los Angeles-based consulting firm. The gathering brings together studio executives, global streamers, platform leaders, investors, and founders to make a case Hernan has been building publicly for months: vertical video is not a format or a feature. It is the third audiovisual language, after film and television, and the industry conversation has barely started.
“Vertical was born as an audiovisual language, really born out of the Creator Economy,” Hernan says. Vertical video, as an entertainment medium, is less than two decades old. But as creators experimented with filming vertically, professional storytellers followed.
“If you zoom out and look at vertical 10 years from now,” he says, “it will resemble the breadth of the television ecosystem, except that I think it will be in many respects more varied because it’s not as constrained by length.”
A Market Most of the Industry Is Still Misreading
The number anchoring Hernan’s thesis is not from microdramas. By 2025, he estimates the total vertical video ecosystem was already generating roughly $100 billion in annual revenue. Meta’s Reels alone had disclosed a run rate of $50 billion. TikTok and ByteDance-owned apps, YouTube Shorts, and dedicated vertical-first platforms round out the rest. Whatnot, the live-shopping app that began as a niche marketplace for collectibles, is nearing $1 billion in annual revenue less than a decade after its 2019 founding.
Microdramas generated an estimated $3 billion outside China in 2025. Hernan frames that against the broader picture. “It sounds like a big number,” he says, “but it’s nothing compared to the television ecosystem when you zoom out and look at all vertical video.”
The industry confusion, in his view, is that most players have mapped vertical onto microdramas and stopped there. But microdramas are only one subset of a medium that will eventually include vertical reality, vertical game shows, vertical documentaries, vertical news, and vertical sports. Hernan believes that the formats that do not yet exist in developed form will come.
“The vertical microdramas are only a subset of all dramas,” he says. “Over time, you’ll see action, fantasy. You’ll see the same evolution that television had over the last 20 years, from procedurals to prestige, from action to animation.”
The Aesthetics Shift That Screenwriters Are Underestimating
The more granular argument Hernan makes is about craft. Most industry commentary on vertical video focuses on format and economics. Hernan adds a third dimension: aesthetics.
“The shift that screenwriters, directors, producers need to make is that this is a bigger change in aesthetics than black-and-white to color or standard definition to high definition or traditional movies to IMAX,” he says. The constraints of the vertical screen, the close-up, and the pace at which audiences expect action require rethinking storytelling from the first line of a script. Adapting horizontal content to fit is not the same thing.
The analogy he reaches for is soap operas in the late 1940s. Someone watching a soap opera in 1948 could not have imagined “Game of Thrones.”
“I think the same evolution will happen in vertical,” he says. “It will just happen at a much faster rate.”
The economics and audience behavior follow from that aesthetic transition, not the reverse. As long as vertical is treated as a distribution wrapper rather than a distinct creative form, the business models built around it will remain incomplete.
Why Hollywood Is Still Waiting, and What That Waiting Costs
In 2013, Netflix was just beginning to build the original-programming engine that would turn streaming into a Hollywood power center. Many traditional media executives saw it happening. Many chose not to move. Hernan was inside Fox International Channels at the time, running a $3 billion division of a company that was selling content to Netflix and a key shareholder in Hulu. He knows the calculus.
“I bet you there are a lot of people who wish they had gotten into streaming in 2013,” he says.
The parallel he finds more instructive, though, is the long resistance of film actors to television. For most of TV’s history, movie talent did not cross over. Hernan references a recent interview with showrunner David E. Kelley, who noted that his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, was a movie actress, “and for the longest time movie actresses didn’t work in television. Only in the last 10 years has that been the case.”
He expects the same reluctance to play out in vertical: film and television talent waiting for budgets to scale and creative possibilities to expand before committing. “But I think that will happen faster than it took television,” he adds.
The market signal he points to is harder to argue with. In the six weeks before the summit, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, NBCU, Paramount, YouTube, and Meta all referenced vertical video formats on their earnings calls or released new vertical products. “To me, that’s a reflection that people are starting to realize that vertical is a new audiovisual language,” Hernan says, “and it’s an engagement and revenue opportunity that neither Hollywood nor the big tech community can leave behind.”
From a Closed Room to an Open Summit
The Vertical Media Summit grew out of a smaller event Hernan held in December 2025: a closed, invitation-only gathering of studios, vertical apps, investors, talent agencies, and IP owners that ran for three hours. The room was focused on short drama. But the conversation revealed a gap.
“It was one of the moments where I realized that the conversation needed to expand,” Hernan says. “People needed to understand the future possibilities of vertical as a business opportunity and as a creative canvas.”
The June 3 event is open and ticketed. Hernan’s opening keynote will present the data behind the thesis. Panels cover why Hollywood and big tech are leaning into vertical, how platforms like TikTok are embracing scripted formats, AI’s role in the production pipeline, and fundraising, scaling, and exit strategy for vertical-first founders. Business model evolution, from in-app purchases to subscriptions to advertising, runs as a thread through the afternoon.
A fireside chat with Joey Jia, founder and CEO of Crazy Maple Studio and ReelShort, is among the most anticipated sessions. Hernan notes that ReelShort is one of the most globally scaled short-drama platforms, and Jia rarely speaks publicly. “He doesn’t do that many public interviews,” he says. “I’m very honored that he chose the Vertical Media Summit to tell his story.”
Speakers also include representatives from YouTube, Google, TikTok, Fox Entertainment, CAA, LionTree, Hoorae Productions, Holywater Tech, Jam City, and East West Bank.
The Questions That Still Need to Be Asked
Hernan returns often to a historical thought experiment: if you had been in the room when television was invented, could you have asked the founders of NBC, ABC, and CBS whether they thought there would be a “Game of Thrones” 70 years later?
That question shapes what he most wants from the summit’s conversations. The business model questions are still open. In-app purchases dominate vertical monetization today. What subscriptions, advertising, and hybrid models look like at scale in this format remains unsettled.
For founders and operators attending, Hernan frames the event around a practical argument about timing. The window that existed for streaming in 2013 is narrowing for vertical. The builders who commit now, before Hollywood’s full entry raises costs and compresses margins, are the ones positioned to own what comes next.
“You’re going to find people that feel that vertical is just a format,” he says. “But I think the shift that creative professionals need to make is that this is something genuinely new.”
Tickets are available at verticalmediasummit.com. The event runs June 3 at the W Hollywood from 11:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
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