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Zee Entertainment’s Q2 FY25: Navigating challenges, eyeing future growth
Mumbai: When life gets tough, we often turn to movies, music, or binge-watching our favourite shows for comfort. Behind the scenes, it’s a robust balance sheet that keeps the entertainment industry going. For Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited (Zeel), a pioneer in India’s satellite television space, the latest financial results for Q2 FY25, announced on 18 October 2024, reflect the company’s determined efforts to navigate a challenging economic landscape while driving growth and profitability.
The company reported a profit after tax of Rs 2,095 million, a 61 per cent increase from the same period last year, underscoring its successful cost-reduction strategies. Improved operational efficiencies helped Zee achieve an EBITDA margin of 16 per cent, up from 13.6 per cent in Q2 FY24, even as the broader macroeconomic conditions remained difficult.
Zee’s Q2 FY25 revenue stood at Rs 20,007 million, a decline of 18 per cent YoY, primarily due to a decrease in advertising revenue. The advertising segment experienced a 9 per cent drop YoY, affected by a muted spending environment. This softness in the market reflected the broader industry’s struggle to regain momentum. In contrast, subscription revenue showed resilience, increasing by 8 per cent YoY as the company capitalised on digital content demand and favourable regulatory changes following the NTO 3.0 implementation.
Zee’s network viewership share increased by 100 basis points over the previous quarter, reaching 17.4 per cent, driven by content enhancements across popular channels like Zee TV, Zee Marathi, and Zee Tamil. “We have strengthened our competitive position with a 60 bps network viewership share gain over the past two quarters and are well-positioned to capitalise on the ad spend recovery,” said MD & CEO, Punit Goenka,.
The company’s digital arm, Zee5, continued its positive trajectory, posting a 6 per cent QoQ revenue increase to Rs 2,363 million. Efforts to streamline the cost structure resulted in a reduction of EBITDA losses by Rs 189 million QoQ. Zee’s focus on balancing growth with long-term financial sustainability appears to be bearing fruit, especially in the face of a challenging macroeconomic environment.
Zee’s financial position remained robust, with cash and cash equivalents rising to Rs 17.8 billion as of September 2024, aided by proceeds from the first tranche of foreign currency convertible bonds (FCCBs). Additionally, the company continued its disciplined approach to managing content inventory, which declined by Rs 4.1 billion during H1 FY25 due to strategic content acquisitions and movie releases.
The reduction in operating costs, primarily in programming and technology, contributed significantly to improving the bottom line. As Goenka highlighted, “Our prudent cost discipline and focused execution enabled us to clock a 630 bps improvement in EBITDA margins despite a challenging macro environment.”
Despite Zee’s strong performance on the profitability front, the ongoing struggle with ad revenue remains a concern. The company acknowledges the need for a sustained recovery in advertising spending, especially with the festive season approaching. While ad revenue showed some signs of improvement towards the end of the quarter, broader market recovery will be crucial for sustaining growth.
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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.
