Epic Studios And Rusk Media To Make 50 Vertical Drama Series

Aditya Pittie of The Epic Company and Karanvir Sofat of Rusk Media, whose companies are partnering on a slate of fifty vertical drama series

Epic Studios has partnered Rusk Media to produce fifty original vertical drama series, streaming exclusively on Alright! TV, with genres running from mythology to mystery, thriller and romance.

Partners: Epic Studios and Rusk Media
Slate: 50 original vertical drama series, with a stated target of 250-plus titles by the middle of next year
Platform: Alright! TV, Rusk Media's OTT service
Genres: mythology, mystery, thriller, romance
Spokespeople: Aditya Pittie, managing director, The Epic Company; Karanvir Sofat, Rusk Media

What Epic Studios Is Actually Buying

Read the announcement closely and the format is the smaller story. The larger one is ownership.

Both companies have framed this as building an owned library rather than licensing content or taking one-off commissions. That is a deliberate choice about where value sits. A production house that works to commission earns a margin once. A production house that owns the catalogue earns from it every time the monetisation model changes, and vertical drama is a format where the monetisation model has not settled yet.

Subscriptions, advertising and eventual international syndication are all still in play. Whoever holds the deepest catalogue when that resolves is in the stronger position, which is the bet being placed here.

The Pace Is The Point

Fifty series is a slate. Two hundred and fifty titles inside eighteen months is a factory.

"A slate of 50 original series is just the beginning, by the middle of next year, we aim to have over 250+ titles, and becoming one of the largest independent IP owners in this space."

That volume is only achievable because vertical drama is cheap and fast by construction. Episodes run to minutes, are shot for a phone screen, and carry none of the production overhead of a premium longform commission. The economics reward throughput over polish, which is precisely why traditional studios have been slow to move into it and why a digital-first partner is doing the distribution half.

Why Advertisers Should Be Paying Attention

Vertical drama has been treated in India as a curiosity, a format borrowed from elsewhere that might not survive contact with local viewing habits. A committed slate at this scale is the first real argument against that reading.

For brands, the format offers something the longform streamers cannot: enormous quantities of short, cheap, genre-defined inventory built for the exact posture in which most Indian media is now consumed, which is one hand, phone vertical, in a gap between other things. If the library gets built, the integration and placement conversations follow.