The founders of aTwist may be newcomers to the microseries business, but they are hardly new to Hollywood.
Susan Rovner, former NBCUniversal executive; Jana Winograde, former Showtime executive; and Lloyd Braun, former ABC and WME executive have spent decades working in entertainment, developing programming, managing talent and building relationships across the entertainment industry. Now, with their new microseries platform aTwist, they are betting that those relationships can give them an edge in an increasingly crowded market.
Ahead of its launch Thursday, aTwist lined up partnerships with traditional entertainment names including Kevin Hart, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Mario Lopez, as well as legacy corporations like BET and National CineMedia. For Rovner and Winograde, those deals are evidence of a larger strategy in diversifying the microseries slate. Rather than treating vertical video as a single-genre business dominated by romance, aTwist wants to build their content library in the way a television network or streamer would.
“Our goal, because retention is such an issue for most of these apps, is to have a really regular cadence of rolling out our originals that will allow us to both eventize our launch over time,” aTwist CEO Winograde tells TheWrap,” but also eventize our shows and really take some of the lessons that we learned in our streaming careers about how you sustain and retain and engage an audience and apply it to the microseries world.”
That means aTwist will roll out new shows every week, with programming timed around holidays and other cultural moments, rather than dropping a large volume of shows and hoping audiences find something they like. aTwist launched Thursday with 10 original titles as well as select licensed vertical content.
“What we had in our head is that we want to lean into fandoms,” Winograde said. “If you’re just doing romance, you’re missing so much of the audience.”
Romance — the genre which catapulted microdramas into a billion dollar industry — will still be part of aTwist’s strategy. As Rovner puts it, “we’re going to fish where the fish are,” recognizing the enormous audience that has already embraced vertical romance, but the company’s programming strategy is designed to use that audience as a launchpad.
“One of the issues that the other apps have is they were leaning so much into this audience that they would put out one horror [project], it wouldn’t work and they’d say, ‘OK, this doesn’t work,” Winograde said. “We spent our whole career as programmers, learning how you take an audience that loves one thing and lily pad them over to love something else.”
That television background has also shaped how the founders view the format itself.
“It really truthfully reminds me of when we were programming for network television, where you had those act breaks and commercial breaks, and you needed that teaser to grab someone,” Rovner told TheWrap of the cliffhangers needed for each minute-long episode. “It’s very similar; it’s just shorter.”
Relationships as a competitive advantage
All three of aTwist’s founders bring decades of experience to an industry that has long been run by new faces.
Microseries thrived at low budgets with scrappy production needs, largely because of the green writers, directors and actors behind them. With aTwist, the founders wanted to keep that scrappy spirit but bring their traditional entertainment relationships along with them.
The founders acknowledged that they don’t have the same track record in microseries production as companies already operating in the space, but they argued that their experience creating and programming television gives partners another reason to trust them.
“There is a trust factor because [our partners] know that even if they haven’t seen what we’ve made yet in the microseries space, neither of us are going to put our names on something that we don’t feel is great,” Rovner said.
Take for instance Kevin Hart. The programmers recently announced their strategic partnership with Hartbeat, the comedian’s global entertainment company, which made aTwist the exclusive home for its slate of original microseries. The 20-series deal will include comedy programming under the LOL umbrella and adaptations of Blake Karrington’s bestselling book series.
aTwist has also announced partnerships with BET to develop and distribute microseries across linear and vertical platforms, with a first-of-its-kind windowing model.
Rovner said companies like BET recognized that traditional cable television needs to approach production differently because of the costs associated with linear programming. Together, they developed a model that could provide the network with inexpensive programming while allowing aTwist to tap into the BET’s established fandom.
Rovner’s relationship with Mario Lopez led to another collaboration. Having gotten to know Lopez and his family during her time at NBCUniversal, she approached him about bringing his family together for a scripted project.
The result was “Honey, I Think the House Is Haunted,” a Halloween-themed series that Rovner described as family-friendly, funny and “a little Scooby Doo.”
“He had the greatest time. His family had the greatest time, and that’s what that’s what we want,” Rovner said. “We really want them to walk away and just be like, ‘Let’s do another.’”
‘None of this stuff has to be expensive’
While aTwist is leaning on established Hollywood relationships, the founders aren’t suggesting that bringing familiar talent to the format means spending traditional television budgets.
“It costs just as much money to write a bad script as it does a good script,” Rovner said.
The founders said they invest in quality scripts, actors and directors to elevate their projects beyond the typical microseries. However, they noted that lower budgets, specifically avoiding unnecessary production expenses, are the key to success in the vertical industry.
“None of this stuff has to be expensive,” Rovner said. “Finding someone who’s an amazing actor, and also giving people opportunities. We take the time to make sure that we have the best actors, that we have the best script, that we’ve hired a director that understands again the things that are important to us, and none of that costs more money.”
Ultimately, aTwist’s bet is that the same fundamentals that helped television networks and streamers build audiences — recognizable talent, strategic partnerships, disciplined production and programming — can be translated to a format designed for mobile devices.
The founders aren’t trying to recreate television on a smaller screen. They’re taking what television learned about keeping audiences coming back and applying it to a format that moves much faster.
“Everything old is new again,” Rovner said.
The post How aTwist’s Hollywood Founders Hope to Use Classic TV Moves to Revolutionize Microseries appeared first on TheWrap.
