TikTok is making a fresh bet in the US, and on the target is Netflix

TikTok has quietly dropped a new app called PineDrama , and it's betting big on a format that's been quietly minting money: micro-dramas . Available now in the US and Brazil, the app serves up serialized shows in vertical, one-minute episodes.

The setup feels familiar. You scroll through a feed, but instead of random TikToks, every video is part of a show.Titles like "Love at First Bite" and "The Officer Fell For Me" lean heavily into romance and melodrama , the kind of guilty-pleasure stuff that's easy to binge. Some shows have already crossed 100 million views, according to Business Insider. Right now, everything's free and ad-free, which makes it stand out from competitors like DramaBox and ReelShort that charge upwards of $20 a week after the first few episodes. A billion-dollar format gaining steamMicro-dramas might sound niche, but the numbers tell a different story.The format pulled in $1.3 billion in the US last year alone, mostly from viewers willing to pay to keep watching. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance , already runs several micro-drama apps in Asia, so this isn't exactly uncharted territory. PineDrama builds on TikTok Minis, a section the company added to its main app late last year. Can TikTok succeed where Quibi failed?Short-form storytelling has had its share of failures. Quibi famously raised $1.75 billion, promised Hollywood-quality episodes under 10 minutes, and folded within eight months.But TikTok isn't trying to recreate prestige TV. It's leaning into low-budget, high-drama stories that grab attention fast and keep it with cliffhangers. With Disney and other major players eyeing vertical video , the race to dominate this space is heating up. TikTok's already proven it understands short-form content better than anyone. PineDrama is the next test.