iWorld
How Broadcast, OTT and Smart TV Ecosystems Are Redefining India’s Content Economy
By Apurv Modi, Managing Director & Co-founder, Abhay Group.
MUMBAI: The Indian media and entertainment industry is entering what I believe is its most defining phase yet. For decades, broadcasting, digital streaming, and device ecosystems operated in parallel lanes. Television dominated mass reach, OTT platforms drove digital disruption, and device manufacturers focused on hardware innovation. Today, those boundaries are dissolving. We are firmly in the convergence era, where broadcast, OTT, and Smart TV ecosystems are not competing with one another but evolving into interconnected distribution and monetisation networks.
This shift has been driven largely by changing audience behavior. Indian viewers no longer distinguish between television content and digital content. They distinguish between convenience and relevance. A consumer may watch a live sports broadcast on television, shift to an OTT platform for a web series, and explore short form or interactive content on a mobile device, all within the same day. The expectation is seamless access, personalized discovery, and uninterrupted experiences across screens.
Broadcast television continues to hold immense power in India, particularly when it comes to scale. Live events, news, and appointment viewing still command massive audiences. However, broadcasting is no longer defined only by linear programming schedules. Broadcasters are increasingly becoming content ecosystem operators. Many networks now extend their presence through OTT apps, catch up television services, and digital first programming strategies.
From my perspective, the real transformation lies in how broadcasters are leveraging digital intelligence to complement traditional reach. Data driven audience insights, once exclusive to digital platforms, are now influencing programming decisions, advertising formats, and distribution partnerships. Broadcast is no longer blind mass communication. It is becoming smarter, measurable, and audience responsive.
OTT platforms, on the other hand, have matured beyond their early disruption phase. Initially positioned as alternatives to television, they are now becoming collaborative partners within the media ecosystem. Co productions between broadcasters and OTT platforms are increasing, allowing content to travel across formats and audiences more efficiently. A show may premiere digitally and later find television distribution, or vice versa, extending lifecycle value significantly.
This collaboration has also reshaped content economics. High quality storytelling requires substantial investment, and shared production ecosystems allow stakeholders to mitigate risk while expanding reach. Regional content has particularly benefited from this model. Stories rooted in local culture are now capable of achieving national and even international visibility through multi platform distribution strategies.
Smart TVs have emerged as one of the most important catalysts in this convergence journey. The living room experience is undergoing a quiet but powerful reinvention. Consumers no longer view television as a single source of entertainment. Smart TVs have transformed the largest screen in the home into an application driven hub where broadcast channels, OTT platforms, gaming environments, and interactive services coexist.
In many Indian households, Smart TVs are bridging generational viewing habits. Traditional audiences continue watching linear television while younger viewers access streaming content or gaming applications on the same device. For advertisers and content owners, this creates unprecedented opportunities for unified engagement strategies.
Brand monetisation is evolving rapidly within this ecosystem. Earlier, advertising models were largely separated between broadcast GRPs and digital impressions. Today, advertisers are looking for integrated visibility across platforms. Smart TVs allow brands to combine the emotional impact of television storytelling with the precision targeting capabilities of digital advertising.
Addressable advertising is becoming increasingly relevant in this context. Instead of broadcasting identical advertisements to every household, brands can deliver customized messaging based on viewing behavior and demographics. This approach improves efficiency for advertisers while enhancing relevance for audiences.
Another important development is the rise of interactive advertising formats. Viewers can now engage directly with branded content through remote enabled actions, QR integrations, or connected mobile journeys. The television screen is no longer a passive medium. It is becoming transactional and experiential.
Content aggregation and distribution strategies are also being redefined. Technology enablement plays a central role here. Aggregators are creating unified discovery environments where audiences access multiple OTT services alongside broadcast offerings. This simplifies consumer experience while strengthening platform stickiness.
From a business standpoint, monetisation models are diversifying rapidly. Subscription revenue remains important, but advertising supported streaming, hybrid subscription tiers, commerce integrations, and brand partnerships are gaining momentum. In some cases, gaming ecosystems and interactive experiences linked to content are opening entirely new revenue streams.
In my experience working across content distribution, mobility enablement, and emerging technology ecosystems, collaboration will determine long term success. Media companies, telecom operators, device manufacturers, advertisers, and technology providers must align strategies to build scalable ecosystems rather than isolated platforms.
India holds a unique advantage in this transformation. Our digital adoption curve has been incredibly fast, supported by affordable data access and a young, mobile native population. At the same time, television penetration remains strong across urban and rural markets. This dual strength allows India to lead hybrid distribution models that combine scale with personalization.
The convergence era is not about replacing one medium with another. It is about integration. Broadcast provides trust and reach. OTT delivers flexibility and personalization. Smart TVs unify experiences within the home environment. Together, they are redefining how stories travel and how brands create meaningful connections with audiences.
As content creators and technology innovators, our responsibility is to ensure that convergence enhances accessibility, creativity, and sustainability. The future of media in India will belong to those who understand that distribution is no longer a channel decision. It is an ecosystem strategy built around audiences who expect entertainment to follow them seamlessly wherever they choose to engage.
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.
