iWorld
LeEco to produce content for India; launches new phone with ‘Supertainment’ package
MUMBAI: Chinese technology player LeEco launched its ecosystem membership program along with its latest smartphone Le 1s Eco in India yesterday. The announcement was made in collaboration with Eros Now, YuppTV and Hungama at an event in Mumbai, along with youth heartthrobs Siddharth Malhotra and Jacqueline Fernandez.
The company has plans to produce its own content for India. According to LeEco Smart Electronics India COO Atul Jain, “I think we will roll it out in phases. As we go deeper in the content space, producing our own content is an option we are considering. But the easier option in the first few months as a ‘go to to a new market’ is tie-ups. That is why we are currently investing in developing strong partnerships in this market and soon we will get in the content business like we do in China. We are taking one step at a time. That will be phase two for us. By the end of the financial year we might have something coming out of our own production pipeline.”
That LeEco, like all the other mobile devices companies from across the world, is going all out to woo Indian customers to buy its products is very obvious. LeEco Content VP for APAC William Lee said, “Today we launched our innovative LeEco membership program with partnerships with Eros Now, Hungama and YuppTV. LeEco is the sole company that delivers a membership program which integrates terminals, clouds and applications in India. Indian Superfans can enjoy more than 2,000 movie titles through Le Vidi, over 100 TV channels via Le Live, and 2.5 million music tracks under LeEco membership.”
The Chinese company also launched a ‘Supertainment’ package which will be available for Rs 10,899, including Le 1s Eco for Rs 9,999 and a one-year membership fee of Rs 4,900, and a LeEco offer of Rs 4,000. For the first flash sale on Flipkart at 2pm on May 12th, LeEco will offer the Supertainment package at Rs 9,999.
Speaking about the Supertainment package, Jain said, “To cope with LeEco membership program, we introduce a special ‘Made for India’ superphone, Le 1s Eco, the first of its kind of integrating a content ecosystem. Le 1s Eco will redefine entertainment in the country. With this blockbuster superphone, we live up to our promise of offering the best value, breakthrough technology and great features at a disruptive price.”
Besides aiming to provide users with rich and high quality content, the company says that its membership program also integrates comprehensive eco-services like personal clouding services -LeEco Drive, LeMall and aftersales services. In 2015, LeEco global membership revenue reached to $417 million, top of its kind in the industry. The membership program provides users a seamless and extreme experience based on LeEco terminals, clouds, and applications, and will include more quality content and eco-services thanks to the company’s business growth in India.
Given the high decibel launch that LeEco had for its ‘Supertainment’ membership, one can’t help but wonder about its marketing strategy to take the buzz further. “We will continue our strategy of reaching out to consumers and users through print and digital for quite some time. Once we are more widely available we will look into going into TV,” revealed Jain.
After its Le 1s bagged the ‘online top-selling’ tag having sold over 200,000 items in just 30 days, LeEco is now eyeing to enter the retail market as well. It would have its own brick and mortar stores by June 2016, informed Jain, to showcase and hawk an array of existing and new products that will be launched in the coming months.
Currently Madison World handles the media account for LeEco while Leo Burnett’s Orchard Advertising Bengaluru does its creative work.
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.
