iWorld
News9 Plus launches ‘The Diplomat’
New Delhi: News9 has announced the launch of its groundbreaking series, The Diplomat, in association with VFS Global as the presenting partner. This exclusive 12-part series is set to explore the intricate world of international diplomacy, offering viewers a unique window into India’s evolving global relationships, strategic trade ties, and its prominent role on the world stage.
Each episode of The Diplomat will feature distinguished ambassadors and diplomats from key global players, engaging in candid discussions on pressing issues such as geopolitical strategies, trade partnerships, and cultural exchanges. The series will delve into how India is shaping and responding to the global diplomatic landscape, with insights on topics ranging from policy alignments to the softer aspects of diplomacy like sports and entertainment.
Anchored by News9’s national security expert Aditya Raj Kaul, The Diplomat promises to be both informative and engaging. With its fresh perspective on serious global issues, presented in an approachable format, the series aims to resonate with younger audiences as well as policy enthusiasts. Viewers can expect a seamless blend of formal diplomatic discourse with lighter, more relatable themes such as cultural diplomacy and culinary experiences of diplomats living in India.
Highlighting the strategic vision behind this initiative, TV9 Network chief growth officer Raktim Das said, “At News9, we are committed to redefining how news is consumed by the discerning English audience. The Diplomat is a unique offering that decodes the complexities of global diplomacy, making it accessible and relevant for today’s audiences. Through this series, we hope to engage viewers in thought-provoking conversations, showcasing India’s expanding role in shaping global narratives.”
The Diplomat will debut on News9 OTT and will be streaming across major Connected TV platforms. With special visibility at key airports in Delhi and Mumbai, the series is set to engage high-profile travellers and global influencers, ensuring maximum reach among India’s most discerning audience.
“Diplomacy is not just about foreign policies and trade agreements; it’s also about the cultural narratives and the human stories that define nations. With The Diplomat, we are bringing these stories to the forefront, giving our audience a 360-degree view of how diplomacy operates behind closed doors and how it impacts everyday lives,” said Aditya Raj Kaul,
VFS Global COO, South Asia, Yummi Talwar said, “We are excited to collaborate with News9 on The Diplomat series, a significant initiative that will provide audiences with deep insights into cross-border relationships. Through candid conversations with ambassadors, we will explore each nation’s growing relationship with India, India’s rising influence globally, and the expanding opportunities in travel and trade. At VFS Global, our mission is to simplify cross-border mobility, and these discussions will contribute to fostering greater understanding between nations, promoting stronger ties and cooperation.”
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.
