iWorld
Care World TV to redefine watching TV by riding big on OTT Content
Mumbai: Care World TV, the largest healthcare satellite channel in Asia is now also one of the first to become available through a host of internet television broadcasting platforms. By embracing over-the-top content (OTT) which today is redefining the way audiences watch TV, Care World TV has put its viewers in the driving seat and has offered them to break away from the shackles of obligatory TV watching. As a niche content channel, Care World TV has found a new haven in broadcasting via the several OTT platforms presently available. This has led to viewers finding their favourite Care World content from wherever and whenever, rather than the channel scouting for its target audiences.
“Taking cue from our success in the United States where a majority of Care World TV USA audience accesses their favourite shows via the OTT platforms, we in India too have made the channel available through a host of these platforms. Apple TV, Roku and Yupp TV are some of the popular online content broadcasting platforms which are gradually making their way into Indian households. Television as a concept has radically changed in the last one decade and a growing set of niche audience’s interest is shaping the future of network programming,” says Mr. Ajit Gupta, Managing Director, Care World TV.
A recent survey suggests that YouTube, Netflix, and Facebook which did not exist a decade ago are the most accessed today for watching videos. 67 per cent of 18 to 49 year-olds admitted that watching a video today is very different from just a year ago.
“YouTube created a paradigm shift in the way content is delivered and watched. Today, it is the biggest platform for niche content providers and is most preferred by audiences because unlike TV it does not oblige viewers to watch what is being broadcasted but instead offers an option to watch what they choose. This has led to many small production houses mushrooming rapidly which create niche content and are successfully finding their own space. Daily Motion is another such audio-video streaming channel that lures niche content producers and Care World is available on this channel too,” adds Mr. Gupta.
Today, Care World TV is available via all of the major OTT platforms including its mobile app – Body Care. It has over three lakh subscribers on YouTube and is increasingly being viewed on Daily Motion. Its mobile app also has live streaming and is an interactive platform for patients to directly consult with medical practitioners.
“Niche content channels had to struggle to find space in the conventional mass channels that are available through cable and DTH. But the introduction and wide acceptance of OTT has changed this equation. Care World TV as a niche content channel that has been running shows dedicated to healthcare and wellness for the last nine years is today rediscovering an audience set that is approaching it because of their interest in it, as against it approaching audiences. We are affirmative that our viewers will appreciate our initiatives on making the channel accessible to them anywhere, anytime and such is the power of OTT,” concludes Mr. Gupta.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
