Hispanic upstart Canela Media has launched Zully, a new app for microdramas in both Spanish and English.
While Canela is smaller than legacy players TelevisaUnivision and Telemundo, it has a different business model. Without linear TV networks or expensive line items like sports rights, it is digitally focused, claiming a monthly audience of 60 million 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 at its upfronts presentation to advertisers in New York. The luncheon event was held Monday afternoon at a restaurant across the street from Radio City Music Hall, which hosted NBCUniversal’s presentation earlier in the day.
Like its Hispanic-media competitors, and a growing number of others investing in the $11 billion market for micro-series, Canela sees a lot of upside in the space. Serialized vertical video series with episodes lasting just a few minutes apiece first established itself in Asia but has drawn significant investment Stateside in recent years. Some skeptics continue to wonder about its long-term sustainability, but a number of scaled players like Fox have dipped a toe into the market. NBCU announced a Bravo vertical video initiative coming to Peacock at its upfront Monday.
Canela’s approach differs from many others by virtue of being heavily reliant on artificial intelligence. A clip from one series, Pride of the Rancho, was shown at the upfront. A cross between a Jane Austen romance and Yellowstone, its live-action scenes were entirely AI-generated. While that can be tricky territory for guild signatories trying to reassure talent that they aren’t being supplanted by cheaper, non-human production methods, an emerging content outlet like Canela has fewer traditional restraints.
The company’s main hub of production is in Mexico, and the microdrama operation is aiming to generate as many as 30 series per month. Unlike others mixing scripted and unscripted, third-party and original, Canela is launching as a 100% scripted, fully owned-and-operated platform. The company says its progress to date in reaching younger, “culturally fluent” audiences will come into play with achieving scale with Zully. Like other Canela programming, Zully series will be free and ad-supported, though a subscription tier is a possibility down the line.
The app is “a natural extension of everything we’ve built at Canela Media over the past seven years,” Rafferty-Zavala said. “We’ve spent years deeply understanding how audiences express culture, move across platforms, and connect with stories, insights rooted in our leadership in the U.S. Hispanic market, where younger, diverse viewers are shaping what drama looks like for everyone.”
