iWorld
Influencer Snehil Dixit joins OMTV’s Ramayan Quiz for season two
Mumbai: OMTV, renowned for its culturally enriching content, continues its commitment to impart India’s rich knowledge system to the youth and children. Following the tremendous success of the first season of “The Ramayan Quiz,” a fun and engaging educational program based on the Ramayana, OMTV is thrilled to announce the launch of its second season. Last year’s initiative witnessed overwhelming participation from 12 premium schools across India, including iconic institutions like Don Bosco Mumbai, Delhi Public School, and Scindia School, resulting in an instant hit among students and educators alike across the country.
The upcoming season promises to deliver even richer content and excitement. OMTV has enlisted the participation of Snehil Dixit Mehra, popularly known as the “Berry Cute Aunty” on social media platforms, particularly Instagram. Snehil became an overnight sensation during the pandemic with her viral “Attendance video,” and her infectious energy has earned her a massive following.
Expressing her enthusiasm for the project, Snehil says, “I’m excited to be part of the Ramayan Quiz. This new avenue aligns perfectly with my interests and desire to engage with kids through storytelling. I have never done quiz anchoring although we have been discussing ideas with Nitin as he is my dear friend, but our schedules did not align. This time, everything fell into place. My son is also of a similar age and hearing about this one-of-a-kind quiz makes me hopeful that the kids will learn a lot about our sacred scripture.
We all want to impart the right knowledge to our kids, and OMTV’s storytelling approach is the best way to do it. Now, this new avenue excites me, as it gives me an opportunity to learn more about Ramayan. I’m thrilled to be part of the Ramayan Quiz and eagerly looking forward to my first day of shooting and meeting all the kids.”
Founder Nitin Jai Shukla further emphasised Snehil’s positive attributes stating, “Snehil is a very versatile person and truly an amazing human being. I have known her for a very long time now. She is successful and puts her heart into whatever she does. We at OMTV are committed to reaching out to the future generation with our modern web shows and kids’ content. So, with the Ramayan Quiz, the idea is not just to make kids read Ramayan, but to inculcate its teachings through a fun quiz format. We aim to reach out to kids and help them learn the values of Indian culture in an engaging manner. Snehil will bring in a lot of youthful energy, and she has a special connection with kids. I’m excited to have her on board for this project.”
With a strong focus on combining entertainment and education, OMTV’s Ramayan Quiz is primed to be a flagship program that brings history and culture to life for young learners. The team behind the scenes is excited to collaborate with Snehil Dixit Mehra and create a show that engages, educates, and entertains the kids of India.
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.
