Tattle TV, a vertical entertainment app, made a lot of noise earlier this year when it turned Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 feature The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog into a scrolling microdrama. The platform’s co-founder, Philip James McGoldrick, joins ScreenMDM Talks to weigh in on reformatting library titles for a new generation, empowering creators, and embracing AI to drive new forms of artistic expression.
McGoldrick has an eclectic resume, having worked on award-winning films (feature-length and short), music videos, commercials, and more at EMC Productions, the independent he runs with his producing and life partner, Marina Elderton. Well-connected in the U.K. creative ecosystem, McGoldrick saw an increasing number of crew members being unable to find work. There were then two lightbulb-inducing moments: an accomplished assistant cameraperson who had been struggling to find work began picking up roles on vertical productions, and dealings with China to distribute his film Tramp allowed McGoldrick to see the surging interest in microdramas.
McGoldrick and Elderton took the leap, setting up Tattle TV and choosing to fully embrace the opportunities created by AI tools.
“If we as a society do not make that radical shift and embrace AI, we will be left behind,” McGoldrick tells me in the latest episode in our The SwitchScreen strand, which you can watch on YouTube below or on Spotify here. “I got more and more involved in coding, in tech, in embracing that side instead of resisting it. I think human first, right? That’s important, but there are opportunities in the AI world, like prompting that employs people. There’s new work to be made. As well as making microdramas with traditional film crews and budgets, we also have to look at the AI side and make sure people have jobs. People who never knew how to write a story or create visuals can use the AI to tell their stories. There’s a positive and a negative to that.”
The platform will be home to both microdramas and reformatted content—as in, making library shows “swipeable and watchable in a different way,” from a range of genres, including reality, romance, and crime.
It uses its internal systems to do that. “It hallucinates some edges, top, bottom, even the sides. And it gives it a bit of extra space. When you recrop a close-up, it can feel a little bit tight. The AI gives it a bit more cinematic space. It’s really adapting it specifically to the vertical frame, not just recropping.”
There are multiple business models at play for the company: working with big media companies and brands, and with external producers and creators for original microdramas. “They’re a bit more costly and a bit more premium, but they are needed to draw the crowd and the right audiences to our platform.”
On the consumer side, meanwhile, it follows a model similar to other microdrama platforms, with an element of gamification—users have to buy coins to watch more episodes—and a traditional subscription for those who want to skip the ads.
As it scales, it is trying out a new feature to empower creators to build their own microdrama businesses. “We want to introduce a UGC category, so people can upload their own microdramas and set their own paywall as well. Say they upload 5 minutes or 10 minutes. [The platform] will cut it up into reels. And then you can set your own frame where you’d want to cut the reel, and you can also set your own paywall. We are hoping that that will draw more creator engagement and a more of a community. A bit like YouTube, essentially.”
Meanwhile, the Hitchcock release was particularly effective for building brand recognition, McGoldrick said. “It sparked a conversation on a national scale, [about] whether old classics, in this case, can be rediscovered, maybe by a younger audience. If you have an old legacy show that you’d like to have seen more of, that’s a way to do it because you’ll come into the news, it will be talked about.”
