iWorld
Streaming surpasses traditional TV: Advertisers follow the trend
Mumbai: As per an Ormax report, streaming has become India’s preferred choice for content consumption, boasting over 480 million OTT users. Its convenience and accessibility, allowing users to watch content anytime, anywhere, and on any device, have fueled this trend. The surge in smartphones, 4G feature phones, and widespread high-speed internet availability in urban and rural areas contribute to this shift, creating a new frontier for advertisers.
Advertisers are capitalizing on streaming platforms’ interactive nature, crafting immersive and engaging ad experiences. Interactive ads seamlessly blend with content, enhancing the viewing experience and resonating better with audiences. Streaming also offers a wealth of data, enabling precise targeting and tailored campaigns, ensuring maximum impact and ROI. Brands are leveraging innovative placements and exclusive content to effectively engage audiences.
According to a Magnite report, 80 per cent of Indian streaming audiences prefer ad-supported content over paying for an ad-free platform. This preference opens up opportunities for advertisers to drive brand awareness, engagement, and conversion. The report indicates that almost half of streaming users actively search for products featured in ads, and one in three makes a purchase based on these ads, underscoring the significant impact of streaming platform advertising on consumer behavior.
Furthermore, 59 per cent of Indian streamers spend an average of 8 hours per week streaming content on the big screen at home. CTV advertising is gaining popularity among BFSI, e-commerce, automobile, and OTT categories, with an expected spending of $395 million by 2027, reflecting a remarkable 47 per cent CAGR growth.
Despite the popularity of UGC platforms for on-the-go content consumption, CTV’s premium and engaging advertising environment sets it apart. Advertisers have more control over ad placement and brand association on CTV, making it a more effective advertising channel. A Kantar report highlights that 22 per cent of consumers are more likely to recall brands advertised on CTV than on a leading UGC platform.
Over the past five years, there has been a 25 per cent decline in Pay TV subscribers, with over 200 million households unreachable by Pay TV, according to an EY-FICCI report. Advertisers are increasingly turning to digital routes, and the decline in Pay DTH subscribers further supports the preference for CTV. Linear TV has consistently declined, with a 6.2 per cent fall in subscription revenue in 2021 and the loss of 6 million Pay TV households.
As streaming, especially CTV, continues to rise, advertisers are adapting strategies for enhanced ad experiences, focusing on creative storytelling and dynamic digital touchpoints. Technological advancements, evolving consumer preferences, and growing advertiser interest are propelling streaming’s strength. The first half of 2024 promises more immersive, powerful, and impactful ads, delighting both advertisers and consumers.
The upcoming TATA IPL is expected to define the next phase of this evolution, with JioCinema unlocking cutting-edge ad innovations on CTV for an estimated 600-650 million viewers streaming the matches across devices for free. Advertisers have a golden opportunity to connect with their desired audiences among cricket fans in this ever-expanding streaming landscape.
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.
