iWorld
BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit to bring new podcast series from 4 October
Mumbai: BBC Studios has announced that producers of natural history programmes such as Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II are bringing their storytelling to audiences’ ears with a new podcast. Whether one is a nature lover, nature curious or haven’t yet realised nature is for one, the BBC Earth Podcast is accessible for all, sprinkling entertainment and humour into stories from around the natural world told by global speakers, experts, and campaigners. It has been commissioned by BBC Studios Digital Engagement.
Starting 4 October, this podcast will drop every week until 27 December on YouTube, Spotify and other platforms where listeners get their podcasts.
Each episode is themed around a core topic – from real life superpowers to the importance of death and decay – which nature-loving zoologist hosts Rutendo Shackleton and Sebastian Echeverri explore alongside special guests including nature Instagrammers, stars of film and television, and the world’s most respected scientists and naturalists.
Colombian born Sebastian and Zimbabwean born Rutendo break down complex and technical subjects into relatable, conversational, and sometimes humorous stories.
Eric Stonestreet, best known from his role in Modern Family features in episode one exploring his inspiration and insight for animal voice acting roles and wildlife, and TikToker Mamadou Ndiaye, the ‘internet zoologist’ entertains in episode three with his comic approach to the natural world.
Rutendo and Sebastian are here to make the natural world available to everyone.
Sebastian said, “Growing up, I did not see myself reflected in any of the people I saw in natural history media, and that made it really hard to envision myself working with nature as a career. But science and the natural world is for everyone, and that is a core message of the podcast.”
Rutendo added, “My hope is that this podcast encourages every listener to go out and appreciate the nature around them – wherever they are! And to feel included in the conservation conversation in whatever capacity they are able to do so. This podcast is meant to encourage everyone to gain a deeper love for the natural world, because when you love something, you’ll fight hard to protect and preserve it!”
NHU Digital head Lee Bacon said, “Here at the BBC Natural History Unit, we knew that there were an abundance of amazing animal stories, passionate expert contributors and unbelievable unheard sounds that were just waiting be shared with the world in a new type of nature podcast, and we’re incredibly excited to be working with BBC Studios Digital Engagement to bring together a fantastically talented team and two brilliant new talents in Sebastian and Rutendo to launch The BBC Earth Podcast. It’s been a highlight of my job to get to listen to what they have been capturing and I can’t wait for everyone to hear what we have been making.”
BBC Studios Digital Engagement VP programming Athena Witter said, “We’re proud to launch a brand-new podcast featuring new talent in the natural history space, with our resident experts Rutendo Shackleton and Sebastian Echeverri taking the helm for this series. Each episode brings in leading voices across a range of topics tied to the natural world and the universe – from superpowers, to death, to activism and beyond – and presents an exciting new digital proposition for BBC Earth’s audience.”
The BBC Earth Podcast was commissioned by Chris Allen and Matt Butler for BBC Studios. It is a BBC Studios Natural History Unit production. The executive producer was Deborah Dudgeon.
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.
