iWorld
GUEST COLUMN: Convergence is India’s next media leap
India’s television industry has moved beyond the survival debate into a leadership phase defined by convergence. Written by Zee Entertainment Enterprises chief revenue officer Laxmi Shetty, it explores the rise of the “Integrated Attention Era”, where television, OTT and digital platforms work in tandem to deliver both scale and relevance. The piece analyses changing viewer behaviour, renewed trust in television, the mainstreaming of regional content, and advertisers’ move towards unified, journey-led planning. It also looks at how IP-first storytelling, collaboration, addressable advertising and AI are reshaping monetisation and measurement, arguing that television’s future lies in integration rather than competition with digital media.
MUMBAI: For over a decade, the industry debated whether television would survive the digital wave. In 2026, the question is no longer about survival: it is about leadership.
India is entering a phase where television is not being replaced, but re- architected. The future belongs to platforms that can connect mass reach with personal relevance, and scale with intimacy. This is where convergence stops being a buzzword and becomes a growth engine.
As 2025 came to a close, India’s media and entertainment ecosystem moved into what I call the Integrated Attention Era: a phase where consumer time, trust and intent flow seamlessly across screens rather than being siloed by platforms. Digital streaming continued to expand rapidly, yet television retained its role as the country’s most powerful cultural and commercial anchor.
Linear television today reaches close to three-quarters of a billion Indians every week. That scale is matched by trust. Television continues to shape national conversations from marquee sporting events and reality formats to movies and news. Importantly, trust in television advertising among 18–34-year-olds has risen sharply in recent years, reaffirming that credibility is becoming as valuable as reach in an attention-scarce environment.
At Zee, this trust advantage plays out every day across a deeply regional, multi-genre network that speaks to India in its many languages. In a fragmented media landscape, this ability to deliver shared moments at scale remains television’s most under-appreciated strength.
From Dual Budgets to Unified Funnels
In 2025, advertiser investments in television were concentrated around tentpole sports and large event properties, often planned alongside digital extensions. While digital platforms added frequency and interactivity, it was television that consistently delivered reach, attention and long-term memory. As a result, marketers began shifting from platform-led planning to what we describe as One Funnel Thinking, where television and digital are orchestrated as complementary forces rather than competing line items.
This shift reflects a broader consumer reality. The explosion of content and subscriptions has created a paradox of choice. Decision fatigue is now a real barrier to engagement, especially in urban India. Scheduled television, with its familiar rhythm and effortless discovery, has re- emerged as a low-friction way to unwind and connect. OTT adoption continues to grow, now crossing 600 million users, but audiences increasingly choose when to control and when to surrender control.
In the Indian context of multi-generational households, this distinction is critical. Television remains the Living Room Anchor, uniting families across age groups, while OTT platforms serve as personalised escapes. The future is not TV versus OTT, it is TV and OTT, each playing a distinct role in the viewer’s daily rhythm.
Regional India: From Reach to Resonance
One of the most defining shifts of 2025 was the rise of regional India from a segmented market to the new mainstream. Viewers across states leaned into culturally rooted storytelling in their own languages: on broadcast as well as streaming. Regional channels saw stronger appointment viewing, while OTT platforms increased investments in local originals, dubbing and subtitling.
This is where broadcast’s decades-long expertise becomes a strategic advantage. At Zee, regional storytelling has never been an afterthought it has been the foundation. Our deep understanding of socio-cultural nuances across markets allows content to resonate across generations and travel across states. Increasingly, regional IPs are evolving into what we term.
Cultural Franchises, properties that scale across languages, formats and platforms, delivering longer shelf life and diversified monetisation.
For advertisers, this has fundamentally changed the playbook. National brands are moving away from uniform communication toward State-First Brand Building, combining sharp local relevance with national consistency. Regional media delivers a rare combination of high reach and contextual alignment: expanding the very definition of mainstream India.
2026: The Year of Collaborative Media
As we look ahead, 2026 will be defined by collaboration. Growth will come from breaking silos and building Connected Content Ecosystems: where television, OTT, digital and social work in unison.
Consumer behaviour already points the way. Discovery increasingly begins on social and short-form platforms, sampling happens through clips and highlights, and deep engagement shifts to the screen that fits the moment—often the television screen for family viewing and live events. Winning in this environment requires what we call Journey-Led Distribution: following the viewer across touchpoints rather than optimising for a single platform.
This makes partnerships essential. Broadcasters, streamers, brands and technology platforms will increasingly co-create IP, co-invest in launches and co-distribute content. Shared measurement frameworks, interoperable ad-tech and privacy-first data collaboration will be critical to scale addressable solutions responsibly. At Zee, we see this as moving from media transactions to Media Alliances—built on shared outcomes rather than isolated metrics.
IP-Led Storytelling and Smarter Monetisation
TV and OTT integration is also accelerating beyond distribution toward IP-First Storytelling. Franchises are no longer designed for a single window. A strong property today must function simultaneously as a television appointment, an OTT catch-up, a social conversation and a brand integration canvas—each layer reinforcing the other.
This approach not only expands reach but increases lifetime value while reducing risk. It also reshapes how talent, formats and brands collaborate—unlocking extensions into short-form content, live events, gaming, commerce and community engagement.
Monetisation models will evolve accordingly. Cross-screen packages that combine television’s scale with digital’s addressability will become standard. For marketers, disciplined frequency management and creative consistency across touchpoints will be non-negotiable. Revenue will increasingly come from a balanced mix of advertising, subscriptions and micro-transactions—tailored to audience cohorts and genre dynamics.
Technology as the Multiplier
Technology will be the multiplier that powers this convergence. Data, AI and distribution innovation are already transforming content creation, localisation and discovery. At Zee, AI is being deployed across subtitling,
dubbing, promo optimisation and audience insights. The next phase will see AI guiding greenlighting, scheduling and creative versioning—improving both efficiency and effectiveness.
With connected TV penetration rising, addressable advertising is set to scale rapidly. Industry forecasts suggest addressable could account for over 16 percent of TV ad revenue by 2026—bringing digital-like precision to television without compromising its unmatched scale.
The Road Ahead
The outlook for 2026 is constructive. As macro conditions stabilise, marketers will prioritise dependable reach, smarter targeting and measurable returns. Television will remain central—especially in regional India and around marquee moments—but its true power will lie in how well it integrates with the wider ecosystem.
The future belongs to companies that think of content as long-term IP, distribution as a network of partnerships, and technology as a strategic enabler. By embracing convergence and putting the consumer at the centre, Indian television—in all its new avatars—will not just endure. It will lead.
“In 2026, growth will not come from choosing between TV and digital. It will come from designing ecosystems where scale meets relevance, and mass media becomes meaningful media and Robust, Transparent and
Interoperable measurement will unlock the true value of cross-screen engagements.”
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.
