eNews
Pickleball World Rankings to host PWR DUPR India Masters in New Delhi
Mumbai: Pickleball World Rankings, the unified global ranking system for pickleball players, is set to host the PWR DUPR India Masters, a PWR700 event on the PWR World Tour, in the capital city of New Delhi. Pickleball, the racquet sport in the world, is poised to establish a strong foothold in India with the launch of this prestigious event.
The tournament will take place from 24 to 27 October 2024 at the RK Khanna Tennis Stadium, marking the first fully owned and operated event by PWR following the successful launch of the PWR World Tour in July 2024 in Dubai, UAE. The Dubai launch, attended by PWR’s anchor investor The Times Group, international pickleball officials, and some of the world’s top players, set the stage for PWR’s expansion across the globe.
All eyes now turn to New Delhi, where an impressive roster of 750 players—both professionals and amateurs—will compete, further solidifying pickleball’s position as a major sport in India. This event is a key milestone for pickleball, boosting its presence on both the Indian and global sports landscapes.
The PWR DUPR India Masters promises to generate excitement for pickleball as a growing sport, offering players a platform to showcase their talents and earn valuable ranking points. Participants include top international players such as Dustin Boyer (United States), Phuc Huynh (United States), Roos Van Reek (Netherlands), Mitch Hargreaves (Australia), Emilia Schmidt (Australia), Pei Chuan Kao (Chinese Taipei), as well as leading Indian players like Armaan Bhatia and Aditya Ruhela. They will compete for a prize pool of USD 50,000.
As a PWR700 event, the tournament will award players up to 700 ranking points, which are valid for 52 weeks, directly impacting their seeding and eligibility for future global competitions. The event will also feature a thrilling PWR Battle of the Leagues—Minor League Pickleball, where teams of 2 men and 2 women will compete across different categories.
PWR CEO Pranav Kohli said, “The PWR DUPR India Masters is a landmark event that highlights the emergence of pickleball as a beloved sport in India for all ages. Our mission is to build a vibrant community around this sport, blending competition and camaraderie. This event not only gives professionals a platform to compete and earn ranking points but also plays a key role in identifying and nurturing domestic talent, fostering a new generation of players and fans.”
The Times Group managing director Vineet Jain said, “Pickleball is now the fastest growing sport in India. The Times Group is excited to bring The PWR DUPR India Masters, the first PWR700 event to the pickleball community. The PWR DUPR India Masters is the first pickleball tournament to be organised at such large scale in India with the participation of globally recognised players, iconic venue and live streaming of matches for viewers. This will further boost the player and fan engagement and drive many more players to make pickleball as a full-time career option. We at the Times Group are proud to be at the forefront of driving the pickleball growth in India and globally”
The PWR DUPR India Masters will be live broadcast on Zoom and Mirror Now and streamed on Times Now (TimesNow.in), Pickleball Now (pickleballnow.in), You Tube channels @ZoomTV, and @ @SportsNowHindi. The live broadcast will start at 12 noon on 24 October and 25 October and at 3 pm on 26 October and 27 October.
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
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.
