iWorld
From solitude to shared screens: How connected TVs Are changing SVOD in India
MUMBAI: Picture this: you’re slouched on the couch, watching the season finale of your favorite show, but the room feels hollow. No one to laugh with, no one to argue about the plot twist. Feels a little dull, doesn’t it?
You’re not alone—literally. A new wave of co-viewing, driven by Connected TVs, is revolutionising how India engages with subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms.
Ormax Media’s latest SVOD audience report 2024 reveals a seismic shift in urban India’s viewing habits. With insights from 3,000 subscribers, the report paints a vibrant picture of a market where language diversity, shared experiences, and tech-savvy innovation drive customer loyalty and growth. From couch-bound solo binging to interactive group viewing, the way Indians consume content is evolving faster than ever—and it’s bringing a mixed bag of emotions along for the ride.
The question is: are you tuning in alone, or are you part of this co-watching revolution?
The report highlights a stagnation in the SVOD audience base, which declined by two per cent to 150.6 million in 2024, compared to 153 million in 2023. This represents 28 per cent of India’s digital video audience, a group dominated by ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) viewers who account for 72 per cent of the market. The slowdown in SVOD growth underscores the competitive challenges platforms face in subscriber acquisition and retention.
A major revelation of the report is the growing impact of Connected TVs, with 36 per cent of SVOD audiences in urban India regularly using such devices to stream content. This trend is expanding beyond metro cities into mini metros and smaller towns, altering how content is consumed.
The report also sheds light on the phenomenon of co-viewing, where 66 per cent of Connected TV users watch streaming content with family members. This shift calls for OTT platforms to prioritise inclusive content catering to diverse age groups and preferences, ensuring a broader family appeal.
Ormax Media, head of business development (streaming, TV & brands), Keerat Grewal underscored the importance of these insights in shaping OTT strategies.
“In a cluttered marketplace where subscribers typically pay for just 2-3 apps, pay OTT platforms must align their pricing, content, and marketing strategies with audience preferences,” Grewal said.
She added, “While platforms have data on their own subscribers, Ormax Media has consistently built industry-wide insights for the Indian OTT sector. Our latest report equips platforms to craft compelling value propositions, grounded in macro-level audience behaviours and tastes.”
Contrary to perceptions that Connected TVs are limited to metro audiences, the report reveals growing traction in smaller towns and mini metros. Grewal highlighted the potential for this shift to fundamentally reshape the type and style of content consumed on OTT platforms in India.
The Ormax SVOD Audience Report: 2024 is now available for subscription and provides valuable data for streaming platforms, brands, and content producers. Covering viewing behaviour, language preferences, genre trends, content sampling triggers, and media habits, the report is a comprehensive resource for industry stakeholders aiming to stay ahead in a dynamic market.
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.
