Growing audiences are getting hooked on serialized shows with mini-episodes.GETTY IMAGES
After training for a career in finance, Sammie Astaneh dove into film instead. He spent years building a career in Canada’s screen industry, producing TV movies and feature films, and growing Vancouver’s Service Street Pictures Inc. one project at a time.Then in 2025, a format he had once brushed off began to look like a smart bet.
Micro-content (also known as micro-dramas and verticals) is designed to be watched on smartphones. They first appeared around 2018 in China. Global revenue for micro-content reached $11-billion in 2025, and by 2030 is expected to hit over $20-billion.
In these shows, serialized stories run between one and three minutes per episode, with endings that keep the audience coming back for more. “It’s a front-loaded medium, so they want those first 10 episodes to really hook an audience,” says David Strasser, a Vancouver-based director and executive producer.
Typically, a viewer will binge a number of episodes, then find the rest behind a paywall. Mr. Astaneh admits that when he first heard about micro-content in 2024, “I thought they were a bit silly. I said to myself, ‘I’m still chasing this carrot to do feature films.’”
However, the format quickly began pulling in stronger writers and recognizable source material. Service Street saw an opening to pivot. GoodShort, a Singapore-based short-form video company, commissioned Mr. Astaneh to produce an interactive micro-content game show in the style of Love Island. Called One Last Temptation Before I Say I Do, the show followed eight contestants living in a villa and drew more than 2-million viewers.
From there, Mr. Astaneh worked with another Asia-based company, ReelShort, to develop The Billionaire’s Fake Wife. The series is an adaptation of a 1980s Bollywood film. It made Service Street Pictures the first Canadian company to secure Bollywood intellectual property for Canadian micro-content, according to Mr. Astaneh. Launched in January 2026, The Billionaire’s Fake Wife has racked up 16-million views to date.
Sammie Astaneh (left) with Anne Kang, B.C.’s Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport on the set of The Billionaire's Fake Wife.Supplied/Warren Tang
Recent years have seen a hit to film and TV financing, says Mr. Strasser, between pandemic slowdowns, Hollywood strikes and more recently, the slowdown in foreign acquisitions of Canadian content. “We’re seeing some signs of recovery, but not at the extent that any of us would have hoped for.”
That has led some industry players towards reinvention, with micro-content filling a gap. Mr. Astaneh says projects like The Billionaire’s Fake Wife, which has 71 episodes, typically have a budget of $200,000 and can be shot in as few as 10 days.
That’s a fraction of what a feature film would cost, and is even less than a single episode of some low-budget series. The lower costs also mean a lower barrier to entry, giving opportunities to emerging filmmakers.
For Mr. Astaneh, micro-content has changed the trajectory of his company. After his early successes, he accepted a consulting position to help a Canadian talent agency represent micro-content directors and creators. He has also begun co-production on several unscripted true-crime micro-content projects. And after speaking at a film conference in the U.K., he was approached by a venture funding group to become an advisor for their micro-content platform.
“It just opened so many doors,” he says.
While Mr. Astaneh still wants to make traditional film and TV projects when the time is right, for now he’s thinking small. “I see a really interesting future for micro-content in Canada. The worldwide appetite will continue to grow.”