iWorld
TTT collabs Hershey India for ‘Butterflies’ season five
Mumbai: Chocolates have been the language of love for ages. Amidst the rush of Valentine’s week, Terribly Tiny Tales (TTT), India’s most loved content company, launched Season five of its flagship web series, ‘Butterflies’, in collaboration with Hershey’s India. Released under TTT’s premier short films banner, Terribly Tiny Talkies, this latest instalment ran from 8 – 13 February, to usher in Valentine’s Day. The series captivates audiences with its exploration of love in various forms.
With this season’s theme #YourForevers, the YouTube series delves into untold narratives of love and connection, leaving viewers with a lingering sense of warmth towards the end. Through its portrayal of diverse facets of relationships, Season 5 captures the depth of each bond, of those who add love and warmth to our lives – friends, family, and partners. With moments of connection enabled by Hershey’s range of chocolates, each tale not only tugs at the heartstrings but also leaves one wanting more at the end of every episode. Retaining the original core of the IP, Sharanya Rajgopal (Studio Head of TTT) has created every episode as a heartfelt dedication from one character to another, beautifully aligning with the season’s theme and encapsulating the enduring joy of love.
Butterflies season 5 tells the stories of seven people over three endearing episodes. In Episode one, titled “To Maya, From Rohan,” Rohan (Ritwik Bhowmik) and Maya (Reem Sheikh) are out on a secret romantic getaway just days before their big fat Indian wedding, seeking moments of privacy and solitude amidst mounting pressures. The storyline explores the tension of their escape and the possible consequences if their families were to discover their truth, culminating in a sweet proposal beneath the starlit sky. Episode two, starring Namita Dubey as Suhani and Asha Negi as Disha, dives into adult friendships. It beautifully illustrates how these connections evolve, navigating life’s changes – taking the viewers on a delightful journey. Episode three, featuring Ashnoor Kaur as Mini, Harsh Gandhi as Ishaan, and Arjun Deswal as Rishi, celebrates the everlasting friendships forged in college amid moments of laughter and vulnerability. It uncovers Rishi’s journey back to his ‘Forevers’ after an absence, and their warm welcome back into the gang.
TTT studio head Sharanya Rajgopal said, “After four successful seasons, we’re thrilled to announce the return of Season 5 of ‘Butterflies’, once again in partnership with Hershey India. Butterflies Season 5 is full of feels. That was the only thing we kept in our mind while working on this season. In each of three episodes we have created characters that will leave the audiences with a warm smile on their faces.”
Hershey India marketing director Ankit Desai said, “Valentine’s Day is a special occasion for our consumers, and with our indulgent range of chocolates, we want to enable them to express love across relationships be it their family, friends or partners. We’re delighted to collaborate with TTT yet again to bring forth heartfelt stories of enduring love through their highly acclaimed web show, Butterflies. In the webisodes, we have captured the diverse spectrum of relationships, much like the wide variety of chocolates in our portfolio, including HERSHEY’S KISSES, HERSHEY’S EXOTIC DARK and HERSHEY’S BARS. For Season 5, we have amped up the game, and in our distinctive style have wrapped all the emotions with captivating storytelling, presented in a delectable package. The stories have come out beautifully and I’m sure our audience will enjoy them.”
With a track record of collaborating with over 200 global brands, TTT remains at the forefront of delivering original and premium content in India, and with each new release continues to redefine contemporary storytelling. This season marks TTT’s venture into the AI territory with a one-of-a-kind song dedication portal, perfectly timed for Valentine’s week. One can visit the portal at yourforevers.hersheyland.in to craft personalized ‘snap songs’ for their loved ones by simply providing a few prompts – adding a layer of sentiment to their expressions of love and affection.
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.
