For immediate release · London · 30 September 2026

‘Nobody watches anything to the end’ says Screenburn CEO, as the company launches a product to solve the industry’s retention problem

• Screenburn Originals sells finished vertical-drama scripts.
• The company’s patent-pending Retention Engine scores every script.
• Writers license their scripts directly to buyers.
• Screenburn Group begins its first fundraising round today; HM Revenue and Customs granted Advance Assurance 18 September.
• Damian Collins OBE chairs the board.

LONDON, 30 September 2026. Screenburn Group today opened Screenburn Originals, a market selling finished microdrama scripts, at screenburn.studio/microdrama-scripts. Every script on the slate carries a score out of 100 from the company’s Retention Engine, the software behind the US patent application it filed in August. Writers also list scripts written on Screenburn. The company opens its seed round today, after HM Revenue and Customs granted it Advance Assurance on 18 September 2026.

The problem is getting to the last episode

Today’s entertainment industry hangs on retention, whether it’s Netflix decommissioning series that aren’t binged, or online platforms pushing viewers to watch dozens of short episodes. Everyone from Facebook to Vegas casinos measures time-on-device; and for online microdrama series, the issue couldn’t be more acute.

A microdrama is a series made for the phone: 60 to 100 episodes of one to two minutes each, shot vertically and watched in an app. Platforms make their money after a paywall, where a viewer pays to unlock the next episode. Platforms only make money if the story holds the viewer past the paywall and on to the last episode. Holding viewers is getting harder. In Screenburn’s CherryBowl (cherrybowl.io) catalogue, tracking tens of thousands of series globally, the median ReelShort series stops giving episodes away after episode 10. Across a group of leading paid apps, new series releases rose 25% in the second quarter of 2026 while total time spent fell 4%, according to Owl & Co. More series now compete for less viewing. The script decides whether a viewer stays, and until now no one could measure that before the series was shot.

What Screenburn’s Marketplace sells

Screenburn Originals are scripts for vertical series of ~80 episodes of about two minutes each. The company writes them in-house under its own editorial direction. The opening in-house slate runs from a psychological thriller to Christmas and small-town romances, and adaptations of public-domain novels, starting with Pride and Prejudice.

Buyers receive the series script, support materials, and a branding pack with the Screenburn Certified mark and score card.

How the score works

The Retention Engine reads every episode and scores the script in four parts. Nothing below 80 carries the Screenburn Certified mark. The company’s editors also choose a small number of Editor’s picks.

Each script page shows a structure strip marking every episode ending, the four acts, and a hook at every fifth episode. Platforms set the paywall. Every script on the slate carries its strongest turns where the paywall lands. Every script also passes the Screenburn structure standard, eight rules for how a vertical series opens, turns and ends.

The seed round

Screenburn Group opens its seed round today. HM Revenue and Customs granted the company Advance Assurance under the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Enterprise Investment Scheme on 18 September 2026. The company raises SEIS first, then EIS. The money funds writers for the slate, sales for the marketplace, and the release of Studio, the company’s script-to-screen production pipeline, to streamers and platforms next year.

Damian Collins OBE joined Screenburn Group as Chairman on 19 August 2026. He served as a Member of Parliament from 2010 to 2024 and as Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy, and he chaired the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, where he led Parliament’s inquiry into disinformation and Cambridge Analytica. Odiri Iwuji, co-founder of C21 Media and Chudor House Productions, sits on the board of advisors.

Quotes

Dr Charles Kriel, co-founder and CEO, Screenburn Group: “The industry has plenty of scripts and series, and very few that people finish. Every platform buys its audience. After that the story either holds them or it doesn’t, and by then the marketing money is spent. We built the engine that measures whether a story holds while it is still on the page. Every script in our shop has to pass that test. Read episode one, read the score, and you know what you’re buying before you spend a dollar on production.”

Kat Viken, co-founder, Screenburn Group: “Microdrama is the fastest-growing screen format in the world, and the companies making it spend more on finding viewers than on the shows themselves. Whether you produce with AI or not, you need a story that holds the audience. Screenburn measures whether a story will hold before anyone spends money making it. That belongs at the start of the process, so that’s where our focus has been when we built the company.”

About Screenburn Group

Screenburn Group is a London company that writes, scores and sells microdrama scripts, and builds the software behind them. Screenburn, its free screenwriting and production platform, is in private beta. Its Retention Engine shows a writer where an audience will stop watching while the writer is still writing, and its privacy wall keeps the AI from reading a writer’s pages without consent. One United States provisional patent application, number 64/140,078, filed on 24 August 2026, covers both technologies and is pending. Screenburn Studio, the paid industrial level, helps studios generate shows using AI. CherryBowl, the company’s intelligence platform, tracks 88,741 shows across 27 platforms in 32 languages and publishes daily global buzz charts. The company is a member of the NVIDIA Inception Program and AWS Activate. Dr Charles Kriel and Kat Gellein Viken founded the company this year. Damian Collins OBE chairs the board. Screenburn Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 17077821.

Links

Screenburn Originals: screenburn.studio/microdrama-scripts. Screenburn: screenburn.studio. CherryBowl: cherrybowl.io.

Media contact

Dr Charles Kriel – [email protected] – +44 7843 501075

Assets available on request

Screenshots of the slate and a script page, the Screenburn Certified mark and score card, the structure strip, founder headshots, and a headshot of Damian Collins OBE.

Recent news

Screenburn Group filed its US patent application on 24 August 2026. Damian Collins OBE joined as Chairman and Odiri Iwuji joined the board of advisors on 19 August 2026.

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