iWorld
Free quality content, easy discoverability, unique features – your mood, anytime, anywhere: RUNN TV’s Manish Sinha
Mumbai: RunnTV, the pioneering Indian free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform tailored exclusively for Indian audiences, has achieved a significant milestone by surpassing 50,000 downloads within a brief period, focusing on select Indian cities. This accomplishment underscores RunnTV’s relevance and resonance with OTT users in India.
Since its launch in November 2023, RunnTV has successfully engaged and captivated audiences through its thoughtfully curated content and a distinctive user experience characterized by a user-friendly interface and innovative features. The platform’s immediate appeal to a diverse audience can be attributed to RunnTV’s unwavering commitment to providing a high-quality entertainment experience that aligns with the dynamic preferences of today’s digital audience.
RunnTV strategically targets the burgeoning and high-growth FAST market in India. The positive response to RunnTV underscores the existing gap and demand for a free TV platform offering excellent user experience and quality content without the clutter associated with an overflow of freely available content. Notably, RunnTV is poised to expand its reach by soon becoming accessible on Smart TVs and other aggregator platforms.
Owned by Runn Media Labs, a forward-thinking company operating at the intersection of media and technology, RunnTV is at the forefront of developing technology and B2C products in the media domain. As the first Indian FAST-based content streaming platform, RunnTV is purposefully designed for the Indian market, offering channels tailored to every mood, genre, taste, and user in a personalized manner. Accessible across mobile, web, and connected TV devices without any subscription, RunnTV is redefining the landscape of free ad-supported streaming television in India.
Manish Sinha is the founder and CEO of Runn Media Labs which launched RunnTV recently as India’s first independent FAST streaming service. Manish has close to two decades of experience in the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry working with top media companies across the globe providing business and technology consulting to top broadcasters, studios, and pure-play OTT companies. With his deep understanding of the media value chain and business models, Manish’s expertise lies in bringing in the right set of industry and consumer insights, and technology to design and build result-oriented streaming businesses.
As RunnTV continues to evolve and expand its channels and content offerings, the company remains committed to providing an entertainment experience that brings many firsts to the Indian OTT audience.
Indiantelevision.com spoke to RUNN TV founder Manish Sinha on the launch of the channel, the emergence of FAST TV in India and much more…..
On the launch of launch RunnTV
While there are plenty of streaming platforms out there in India with a plethora of content choices, there exists a gap for a platform that looks at the Indian market in a very focused and contextual way. India is not a subscription economy and is primarily a free streaming market with more than 70% of consumption happening on free streaming platforms. The subscription-based consumption is not only small but also faces many challenges such as churn, account sharing and most significantly, fixed subscription revenue against variable consumption costs.
The free streaming platforms in India have either low-quality content offered for free or discoverability issues with quality content lost within a dump of low-quality content or both. Even the new FAST-based platforms launching in India are just chasing the count of channels and not evaluating the channels’ relevance or fitment for Indian audiences.
This is the gap and opportunity that we are targeting with RunnTV and ‘now’ is the right time with multiple factors at play – Fast growing digital and CTV advertising with increasing CPMs and CTRs, increasing Smart TV market share in new TV buying, development of FAST ecosystem in India, continued internet penetration and affordability, and rationalisation of content costing after non-sustainable boom post-pandemic.
On connected TV and other digital platforms today, what is your USP
We are focused both on delivering unique user experience and on building a long-term sustainable streaming business so that we can keep delivering such experience to our users consistently and keep getting better at it.
Our USP is the unparalleled combination of quality content, easy discoverability and unique features available at no cost to users. Highly curated content is presented to our users as channels with time shifts and catch-up options. In addition to proven categories like movies, shows and news, we are also making discoveries and audience-building for contemporary users’ tastes such as short films, stand-up comedy, and podcasts. We will also be rolling out multiple new and industry-first features such as personalised channels in the next two quarters. We can achieve this as we have built our proprietary technology that powers RunnTV with full control of user experience.
In summary, our USP is our content strategy and user experience which is made possible by our proprietary technology.
On the revenue model for such a venture
RunnTV will be monetized through ads and sponsorship that will include programmatic and direct sales including video ads, AFPs, sponsorships and promotions for brands and channels. Digital is the high growth area and is the future of TV consumption. The 70% of new advertising spend in 2023 went to digital. Within digital advertising, CTV is the fastest-growing advertising channel, the first preference for brand marketers and has highest CPMs. This will only go north for the next decade and we can benefit from it significantly if we build the right foundation in the next couple of years.
Additionally, our technology will again play a critical role in maximising our fill rates and CPMs while keeping our ad insertion costs low.
On consumers switching to RunnTV
The consumers will come to RunnTV for its curated content and experience built around ease of access and discoverability. With the current free streaming platforms, the consumers have to get through a clutter of irrelevant content to find something ‘watchable’. They need to be good with search or have the patience to browse and navigate. RunnTV is free too, but the content is curated and discoverability is easy.
Subscription-based streaming platforms are chasing originals and exclusives to drive consumers to their platforms. The paying consumers will go to these platforms and we don’t expect them to just switch to RunnTV. But they want to watch good content when not watching these limited exclusives on platforms they have subscribed to. They just need to have some of their monthly watch time with RunnTV watching good content served to them with ease of access and discoverability.
The initial response we have got for RunnTV from consumers underscores this relevance and interest for OTT consumers in India. It is very early days but it will only get better from here with every new release we do and every channel we add.
On achieving 50 thousand app downloads within a month of the launch, your thoughts
We are excited about this milestone achieved in such a short span and that too with targeting only selected cities in India. I think that it is a result of our sharp focus on Indians as our users and India as our market. We have thought extensively about each element of experience for the ‘Indian OTT consumer’ including the user journeys, features, content preferences and consumption patterns.
The consumers installing in such numbers are a validation of our need hypothesis for such a platform in India and the number of DAUs we are seeing can be attributed to the relevance of content and good user experience that is being delivered by RunnTV.
On the future of Fast TV in India and this subcontinent
FAST TV is a proven concept in the Western world where the countries are largely not price-sensitive markets. It has seen such adoption and success in those countries not because of it being free but because of the multiple user-friendly aspects of FAST TV including convenience, lesser decision overload and access to different content.
India and the subcontinent is even more suited for FAST TV with it being a price-sensitive region. Additionally, with the given demographics, its size and rising income, India will continue to have a rapid increase in consumer spending that will continue to positively impact advertising spends by brands on digital channels, where CTV is the fastest-growing segment at 47 per cent CAGR.
We have all the favourable, and so many, factors for FAST to be immensely successful in the coming year in India and the subcontinent – price-sensitive users, large and growing consumer base, growing digital ad spends, high free streaming market share, decline in traditional TV subscriptions, and growing Smart TV penetration.
On the vision and way forward
We are building RunnTV with a vision to make it the Entertainment Experience Destination for Indians across the globe. And in the next 3 three years, we see ourselves to have gained the trust, confidence and alignment of our consumers, content partners, and advertisers on that journey and a robust technology to fuel that journey.
Quantitatively, we see ourselves to be at 20M plus MAU in India in the next three years with RunnTV being one of the top three FAST platforms in India in terms of user engagement and growth and one of the preferred and trusted streaming platforms for content partners and advertisers.
On the trends for 2024
The year 2024 is going to be a landmark year for the Indian Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry considering the current state and the possibility of the emergence of two media behemoths with mergers and acquisition activities in the industry. It will change the industry order and force and alter industry trends.
Traditional TV, as DTH and cable, will continue to decline with cord cutting phenomenon and the growing share of Smart TVs in new TV purchases. The trend may just intensify with the availability of more and more aggregators and bundled offerings and with the new FAST platforms. 2024 will also have multiple launches of FAST-based streaming platforms fuelling the rapid development of the FAST ecosystem in India including tech, content and advertising. On the content side, I see some rationalisation on content licensing and commissioning deals with streaming companies looking to control costs with a stricter evaluation of real value and return on such content investments.
Generative AI is also expected to get some footing in 2024 not in terms of implementation itself but in terms of use cases, experimentations and pilots for content creation.
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.
