iWorld
MX Player reveals slate of new series for October 2022
Mumbai: MX Player is geared up to refresh festive moods with its latest slate of crowd-favourites, critically acclaimed and much anticipated international shows from all around the world, dubbed in Hindi and other regional languages. Here’s a list of everything they’re bringing this October:
MX VDesi Shows:
Love Story of Court Enemies
The Mandarin drama follows two sisters, Zhao Yu Xing and Qiu Qi, who were separated after being displaced by rebels that sought to kill them. The sisters have to navigate court politics and conspiracies as well as come to terms with their own hearts. All 25 episodes of the series are now available in Hindi exclusively.
Playful Kiss
This series is a romantic comedy about a high school girl named Oh Ha Ni who moves into the home of her crush, Baek Seung Jo, after her house is destroyed. The award-winning Korean drama follows their relationship through high school, college, and beyond. Will she be successful in winning Seung Jo’s heart?
The series will be available in Hindi from 5 October onwards.
Once Again
A Korean story of the eventful Song family, who can’t get a day of peace with their neighbours in Yongju Market. Song Young Dal, a frugal father, and Jang Ok Boon, a pushy mother, have been married for a long time and are worried about the future of their four children—one of which is set to get married and two of which are divorcees. Partway through, enigmatic kimbap restaurateur Kang Cho enters the battle and establishes a location in the Yongju Market. How will the other characters be affected by her appearance?
The show will be available in Hindi from 8 October onwards.
Ni Chang
Set in the Ning dynasty, the story revolves around Xie Xiaoni, who aspires to become a business woman. Xiao Ni vows to seek vengeance for her family after they were framed and murdered by the Su family. She assumes the name of Ni Chang and enters the Yunjin Pavilion to learn embroidery skills. Over time, with hard work, she managed to establish her position in the industry. Will the Su family find out her truth?
The show will go live on 12 October. Originally in Mandarin, the show will be available in Hindi.
The Secret Life Of My Secretary
T&T Mobile Media’s team 1 leader, Min Ik, is a brilliant perfectionist with a heart of stone who often relies on his fiery-tempered secretary, Jung Hee. She faithfully performs the chores that her abusive employer assigns her, but she is not afraid to express her opinions. What is the future of this hot and cold relationship?
The 16-episode Korean drama will be available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, and Malayalam, starting on 15 October.
The General’s Daughter
This Filipino show is based on a military nurse, Rhian Bonifacio, who is a second lieutenant in the Philippine Armed Forces. However, she has a secret: she was trained to be a spy in the army by her adoptive father, Tiago Guerrero, to exact revenge against their mortal enemy, Marcial De Leon, a high-ranking general. Bound by love towards the family she grew up with, she finds herself amidst the feud of two families: her fake family and the real.
The show will be available in Hindi from 19 October onwards.
Sky Castle
A satirical series that closely looks at the materialistic desires of upper-class parents in South Korea and how they ruthlessly secure the success of their families at the cost of destroying others’ lives. The drama revolves around the lives of housewives residing in a luxurious residential area called SKY Castle (a reference to the elite universities) in suburban Seoul, where wealthy doctors and professors live. The wives are determined to make their husbands more successful and to raise their children to be top students who will be accepted at the best universities, so they use every possible way to achieve that. Watch the story unfold over the course of 20 episodes starting from 22 October onwards in Hindi.
Hostages
In this Israeli crime thriller, Yael Danon, a renowned surgeon, is seen getting ready to operate on the Israeli president and is startled when a gang of four masked men kidnaps her family and gives her an ultimatum: she is told to assassinate him during the surgery in order to prevent the murder of her family. Everything goes awry the night before. Yael tries to save both the president and her family before it’s too late. Will she succeed?
All 22 episodes will be available in Hindi from 26 October onwards.
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.
