Former UK Tech Minister Damian Collins Named Chairman of Screenburn Group

Damian Collins, a former UK government minister for tech and the digital economy, has been appointed Chairman of Screenburn Group, a London-based company that builds tools for the scripted television business and owns the microdrama tracking service CherryBowl. The move was announced on 18 August 2026, according to Deadline.

Collins spent 14 years as a Member of Parliament and chaired the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee, a cross-party panel that scrutinises government policy on those sectors. He was a government minister responsible for online harms, digital competition and AI safety, and played a role in passing the UK's Online Safety Act, the country's landmark law governing what platforms must do to protect users from harmful content.

He is also an OBE recipient and leads the public policy practice at the London law firm Geradin Partners, where he is described as an expert on digital regulation (Geradin Partners).

Screenburn Group was founded by Charles Kriel, a game designer and independent film director, and Kat Gellein Viken, a television showrunner. The company builds tools for the scripted business based on a patent-pending scoring engine — a system designed to evaluate and rank scripted content using technical criteria rather than human taste.

Its subsidiary, CherryBowl, is a research and ranking service for microdramas: short-form, vertically filmed episodic series made for mobile viewing, a format that has exploded across platforms in Asia and is spreading fast in Western markets. CherryBowl tracks more than 74,000 titles and 3.6 million episodes across major microdrama platforms, according to Deadline.

What gives the appointment its bite is the collision of two worlds. Collins spent years in Parliament holding tech platforms to account, most notably in November 2018, when as committee chair he led lawmakers who seized a cache of Facebook documents under a rare parliamentary mechanism and leaned toward publishing them (Business Insider). Now he chairs a company operating inside one of the fastest-growing corners of the streaming landscape — one where content regulation, platform accountability and creative production are all tangled together.

Screenburn Group is preparing to launch a funding round in autumn 2026, per Deadline. Bringing in a chairman with deep regulatory experience and public profile signals that the company wants to be taken seriously by investors watching the microdrama space evolve.

Odiri Iwuji, co-founder of the trade publication C21 Media and production company Chudor House Productions, has also joined Screenburn Group's board of advisors. Her background bridges the international content trade that Screenburn's tools are built to serve.

For the people making scripted television, the bet here is that data and scoring engines will matter more as the volume of content keeps climbing. For the people watching microdramas on their phones, CherryBowl's tracking of 74,000-plus titles means someone is at least trying to count a format that most traditional ratings systems have not caught up with.