iWorld
‘Sesame India’ to hit Cartoon Network & Pogo next year; Miditech roped in as production house
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MUMBAI: Supporting India’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (universal access to education) initiative, the nonprofit educational organisation — Sesame Workshop and Turner — have announced the local version of the same titled Sesame India. Sesame India is the local adaptation of kid’s series Sesame Street, which will debut on Cartoon Network and Pogo in February next year. |
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Miditech will be producing the series. The team spent two weeks in New York to begin developing the series’ characters and set, which will be ultimately created and built in Delhi.  Miditech’s writers and puppeteers were trained by US-based counterparts from Sesame to suitably hone their skills. In-studio production for the 65 half-hour episode series will begin in February 2006. India’s rich cultural diversity will also be reflected in the music and regionally produced live action and animation films. To address the local needs of children and to ensure relevance and resonance, Sesame India will incorporate an innovative curriculum developed by Dr. Asha Singh, research head of Sesame India, and other Indian educators. In addition to teaching basic cognitive skills such as literacy, Sesame India will represent the vibrancy of India’s multi-culturalism. The series will celebrate the similarities and differences that are part of children’s every day lives. “We are proud to have been selected as the producers for an innovative new series for India’s children. We will intimately work with two of the top media companies in the world to ensure a truly local and culturally-relevant program that is authentic and distinct,” said Miditech president Niret Alva. Turner Entertainment Networks Asia senior vice president and general manager Ian Diamond said, “Having successfully shaped the kids’ television genre in India, and drawing on our decade long experience, we will push the boundaries and redefine, yet again, meaningful television for young kids in India.. The collaboration will combine the rich understanding and unique expertise of each partner to create ground breaking, premium quality content that is guaranteed to stimulate and engage young kids.” “Sesame India will provide daily access to millions of children with quality educational content based on a curriculum determined by Indian educators with intentions of achieving measurable impact. Our goal is to work with the most innovative partners, which we have, to educate and entertain India’s children in a culturally sensitive manner, and encourage them to laugh, learn and grow,” said Sesame Workshop president and CEO Gary E Knell. In addition to the television series, educational outreach materials and activities will be developed to enhance the impact of the educational messages and to provide parents and caregivers tools to help their young children. The Sesame India project consists of two phases namely – development and implementation. The development phase was funded by USAID and ICICI Bank. Turner will provide support for the second phase, which involves the television series and some of the educational outreach. |
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.
