iWorld
India’s OTT paid video subscribers pegged at 1.3 million: Frost and Sullivan
MUMBAI: OTT (over-the-top) was the buzzword in the Indian media and entertainment sector in 2015 with multiple players firming up their game plan to tap into the lucrative and booming digital space. With the emergence of numerous OTT service providers in the past two years coupled with the entry of Netflix in India, the space is poised to grow at a fast pace in the years ahead.
According to Frost and Sullivan’s market insight on the OTT video market in India, there are about 66 million unique connected video viewers in India every month, and about 1.3 million OTT paid video subscribers. Growth in the space can be attributed to increase in smart-phones penetration as well as the improvement in Internet speed in India.
Despite facing several challenges today, the OTT market growth will be fuelled by various disruptive innovations in technology and business models over the next five years, as per Frost and Sullivan.
“With an increase in the use of smart devices in India, content owners and aggregators are using non-TV platforms to improve reach and generate revenues through subscription and advertisement. However, it’s hard to woo the Indian consumer. Success in OTT video distribution will depend on the ability to offer variety of content, new content, at a reasonable price and impeccable user experience,” said Frost and Sullivan research director Vidya Subramanian Nath.
While today a few broadcasters such as the Star TV Network and Zee Entertainment are driving services as well as viewership for OTT video with Hotstar and DittoTV respectively, over the next five years, there will be more broadcasters as well as cable and DTH operators expanding their OTT services. However, inadequate bandwidth speeds and the incumbency of YouTube in the market have challenged market participants.
“India may have over 225 million Internet users, but for consuming video, one needs high-speed broadband access and only about 35 per cent of these users have access to it, informed Nath. “OTT video subscription numbers fluctuate dramatically every month. We find that advertising video on demand (AVOD) is the most preferred mode of OTT video delivery in India currently,” she said.
Among content types, there is an increasing demand for short duration video content. This is primarily attributable to the average low Internet speeds and changing preferences of many Indian viewers. It is common to find online viewership peak during major sports events like the IPL, elections, or breaking news.
Platforms such as YouTube offer opportunities for independent content creators who can publish their videos online without the hassles of negotiation with large networks. Now, with the entry of Netflix in India, independent professional content production will continue to grow. Broadcasters who have their own content or video platforms with a variety of publishers are driving the market. While Viacom18 is all set to launch its service called VOOT next month, Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Telefilms is also burning the midnight oil to launch its OTT platform – ALT Digital by June this year. Balaji Telefilms CEO Sameer Nair has huge expectations from the platform and expects ALT Digital to have a whopping four million paid subscribers globally by 2020.
With substantial investment being pumped in by companies like by Star India (Hotstar), Sony Pictures Networks India (Sony Liv), Zee Enterprises (dittoTV), Eros International (ErosNow) and Singtel, Sony & Warner (HOOQ) amongst others, the competition in the OTT space is set to intensify with the key differentiators being user experience and variety of content offering.
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.
