Press release · London · 25 August 2026

Screenburn Group files US patent on software that shows writers where viewers stop watching

Retention decides what gets commissioned now, from Netflix to the microdrama apps. Screenburn measures it while the script is still on the desk. The same filing covers a design that keeps screenplays away from AI.

LONDON, 25 August 2026 — Screenburn Group has filed a United States patent application covering two features of Screenburn, its free screenwriting and production software. The first shows a screenwriter where an audience will stop watching, while the writer is still working on the script. The second lets a writer use AI help without the AI ever reading their screenplay.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office received the application on 24 August under number 64/140,078. It names Charles Kriel, the company’s co-founder and CEO, as sole inventor. Screenburn Ltd holds it. The filing follows two board appointments last week: Damian Collins OBE, the former UK Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy, joined as Chairman, and Odiri Iwuji, co-founder of C21 Media and Chudor House Productions, joined the board of advisors.

Screenburn is free screenwriting and production software, in live public alpha testing with a launch coming soon. It guides a writer through story structure in nine separate formats: feature film, television pilot, microdrama series, short film, YouTube short, novel, short story, scripted reality and story campaign. Early adopter writers already have 89 features, 43 shorts, 42 microdramas and 38 TV pilots in development, and have written more than ten thousand scenes. Screenburn Studio, the paid industrial level, helps studios generate shows using AI.

Retention now decides what gets made

For a hundred years the entertainment industry judged its work by box office, viewership and reviews. That has changed, and the change is recent. The industry’s number one metric now is retention: whether viewers stay, episode to episode and across a whole series. Netflix renews on how many people finish a show. YouTube ranks on watch time. The microdrama apps live or die on whether a viewer swipes into episode two.

Nobody can measure retention until the show exists. A commissioner reads a script, makes a judgement, and learns the answer months later when the figures come back. The money has gone by then.

The first patented feature moves that measurement forward. It reads the notes a writer already keeps about their own story: what each scene is for, what happens in it, where it sits in the running order. From those notes it scores the story for hooks, for cliffhangers, and for the points where an audience gives up.

It works in stretches. The software cuts the story into stretches of roughly equal viewing time and scores each one. It grades a stretch by its worst score rather than its average. People quit at the weak part, and a viewer who quits at episode four never reaches the strong stretch at episode nine. The software finds the worst stretch and tells the writer to fix that one first.

Formats hold people in different ways. A sixty-episode vertical drama and a returning television series shed their audiences at different points, so the software changes what it looks for according to the format.

The AI never sees the script

Most AI writing tools send the writer’s script to an AI company’s servers. The writer has to trust that the company will not store it, share it, or train its models on it.

Screenburn’s second patented feature makes that trust unnecessary. The server keeps the script in one place and the AI in another, with no route between them. When a writer asks for help, the server sends the AI only two things: which question the writer is answering, and which format they are writing in. The script never gets sent, because the part of the system that talks to the AI has no way to reach it.

That holds when something goes wrong. A bug, a browser extension or an attack cannot open a door that was never built.

A writer who wants AI analysis of their own writing can ask for it. The server refuses until the writer consents, and tells them what they are agreeing to before they do.

What the company is building

The company builds two products. Screenburn is the free screenwriting and production software described above. CherryBowl, the company’s intelligence platform, tracks 76,230 shows across 27 platforms in 32 source languages, and publishes daily global rankings for producers, studios and platforms.

Screenburn Group opens a funding round this autumn.

Quote

Charles Kriel, co-founder and CEO, Screenburn Group: “Every commissioner now asks the same question about a script: will people finish this? Until now you found out after the show was made and the money was spent. Screenburn answers it while the writer is still writing. And it answers it without sending the script to an AI company. The AI in Screenburn helps the writer, but it cannot read the screenplay unless the writer says yes.”

Media contact

Charles Kriel – [email protected]

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