iWorld
Crime Patrol maker looks forward to more online content
MUMBAI: Shlok Entertainment, headed by the makers of Crime Patrol, Subbu and Neeraj Naik, had launched an intense suspense thriller titled The Razor’s Edge on Youtube some time back.
Talking about the film, Shlok Entertainment director and producer Subbu said, “With the evolution of the internet, we broke the norms with this film and released it on the internet as we feel that it is the right medium for our target audience. A digital release will allow the viewers to enjoy this film in their own space.”
He further added, “Now twitter gives you an option to watch a one minute snippets whether it’s news or anything else. A majority of the audience watch television episodes on YouTube. A few years ago, Tata Sky started the trend where, with the help of a DTH recorder one could record and watch a favourite show at a convenient time. Now YouTube has taken it to the next level. Most of the channels have started their own web platforms and are uploading their content to tap into online audience.”
The Razor’s Edge was released on 23 October, 2015, and received 5,342 views so far. “The response has been decent. I would not say that the response was very good but we are happy with it. It will take time to get the eyeballs but soon will meet our target,” Subbu said.
The film attempts to expose the trials and tribulations of the film industry while keeping the audience at the edge of their seats. It follows the journey of the protagonist, Sameer played by Pankaj Singh, who like any newcomer, finds no takers for his script. Moreover he lacks backing. His fortune takes a turn when he befriends Tanya played by Shweta Gulati. All doors mysteriously open up for him.
Suddenly Sameer has a line of producers knocking on his door to work with him. Things looksbright for Sameer until Tanya becomes the prime suspect of all the gruesome murders of the producers who refused to work with him.
When asked why he chose to go digital with the film Subbu said, “The idea was to make a suspense thriller because we have been doing shows in that genre for a long time now. With a shorter thriller film it was a good opportunity to foray into digital. Digital is the next big thing with growing viewership and advertising revenue therefore we wanted to explore the platform with this film.”
The production house is looking forward to create more content for online platform. The plan is to come up with new films with an interval of two to three months for online viewership. The team is already working on the couple of ideas.
Speaking about the revenue model he explained, “Currently the concept is not the revenue generating because the digital platform still commands lesser share of advertisement as compared to television. Moreover we lack sponsorship. From a revenue perspective, it looks difficult right now as lots of people are a part of it and many big companies have been associated with a huge library of content with them. So the subscription model works for them. But for smaller entities like us, it may be revenue generating when sponsors come in, because at the end of the day advertising works on viewership. We are hoping more for sponsors to come in as we garner more views on the videos.”
Recently we have seen many OTT players bringing back the discontinued shows on their digital platform. “I see a lot of that happening right now. Netflix has pioneered this trend of moving content from television and putting it on digital. There are a lot of companies that wanted to make content for digital. Today’s younger generation doesn’t watch television which is why the digital space is growing. They prefer to watch series online and some of them don’t have television sets at home. Social media’s growth has also promoted the online content,” he said.
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.
