Hispanic startup Canela Media has launched Zully, a new app that lets you watch microdramas in both Spanish and English.
Canela is smaller than traditional players TelevisaUnivision and Telemundo, but has a different business model. Rather than using expensive products such as terrestrial television networks or sports rights, it focuses on digital and boasts 60 million monthly active users across AVOD, FAST, social media and YouTube. Isabel Rafferty-Zavala founded the company in 2019 and runs it as CEO.
The company announced Zully during an upfront presentation to advertisers in New York. The lunch event was held Monday afternoon at a restaurant across the street from Radio City Music Hall, where the NBCUniversal presentation was held earlier in the day.
Canela sees a lot of upside in this space, as more competitors in Hispanic media and other companies invest in the $11 billion microseries market. Continuous vertical video series, with episodes lasting just a few minutes, first established themselves in Asia, but have also attracted significant investment in the United States in recent years. Companies of many sizes, like Fox, are entering the market, although some skeptics continue to question its long-term sustainability. NBCU announced the Bravo vertical video initiative coming to Peacock on Monday’s Upfront.
Canela’s approach differs from many others in that it relies heavily on artificial intelligence. A series of clips, pride of ranchowas displayed on the upfront. Jane Austen’s romance yellowstoneall of its live-action scenes were generated by AI. It can be tricky territory for guild signatories looking to reassure talent that they won’t be replaced by cheaper, more impersonal production methods, but emerging content outlets like Canela have fewer traditional constraints.
The company’s main production base is in Mexico, and its microdrama business aims to produce up to 30 series per month. Unlike other companies that offer a mix of scripted and unscripted, third-party and original, Canela is launching as a 100% scripted, fully owned and operated platform. The company says its previous efforts in reaching “culturally fluent” younger audiences will be leveraged in achieving scale with Zully. Like other Canela programs, the Zully series will be free and ad-supported, with the possibility of a subscription tier in the future.
The app is “a natural extension of everything we’ve been building at Canela Media over the past seven years,” Rafferty-Zavala said. “We have spent years deeply understanding how audiences express culture, move across platforms and connect with stories. This is an insight rooted in our leadership in the U.S. Hispanic market, where young and diverse audiences are shaping what drama looks like for everyone.”
