iWorld
Vidnet’22: Industry experts talk about availability of original content remain unexplored in OTT space
Mumbai: Over the top, commonly known as OTT, has come a long way in the last five years. According to a new report by independent transaction advisory firm RBSA Advisors, India’s streaming market is predicted to be worth $15 billion by 2030 and out of which the video market will grow to $12.5 billion size and the audio will be $2.5 billion.
During the sixth edition, Indiantelevision.com’s pioneering Vidnet Summit held in April brought together the industry experts to deliberate views on the evolution of OTT space and how the new order will be.
The experts such as Lyca Productions CEO Ashish Singh, Fremantle India Television Productions managing direct Aradhana Bhola, MX Player chief content office Gautam Talwa, Indian film direct and screenwriter Ken Ghosh, Eros Now head of content Puja Rajadhyaksha, Juggernaut Productions OTT president and COO Samar Khan, Ullu head-content strategy and business alliances Nivedita Basu and moderated by Bodhitree Multimedia Ltd managing direct Mautik Tolia were among the panelists present during the discussion of the topic ‘The Evolution Of OTT Content: The New Order’, recently held in Mumbai.
Reminiscing the initial days of OTT, Tolia highlighted how challenging it was to produce OTT content, to ensure that it reaches the right audience in the market.
“When we started our first Youtube show, it was twelve-minutes long, we were so worried if the audience would watch it, how would they deal with buffering, will they like it? and other challenges,” he said.
Further, he also put some light on the evolution of the OTT space, he named a few shows like Mirzapur, etc., which really helped the industry become bigger.
Opening up the conversation, he asked Khan about how he’s seeing the new order or second phase of OTT taking place?
Specifically, pointing out the challenges that the second phase of OTT is presently struggling with, he said, “If we look at the content required on an annual basis across the top OTT platforms- the biggest challenge is to find new stories for the next phase of OTT. If all the platforms launch just one show per month, on an average the industry would require 85-90 shows every year. But where are the stories?”
In addition, he said, “the second challenge is to find talent to tell those stories on screen.”
However, Rajadhyaksha disagreed with Khan. She said, “there’s a lot to be explored in the country.” She feels that OTT creators are not struggling with the content, there will be a surge in the regional content. She added, “As the mindset of the young Indian audiences is evolving, topics like women empowerment, cultural and inspiration stories,etc., are yet to be explored. So, finding new stories is not a challenge.”
Basu who has recently joined Ullu thinks that stories are around us all the time, creators need to present them beautifully to leave an impact. Quoting the example of stories like Gullak, Mai, she said, “We don’t really need to hunt for something new but to present what is there with all our heart.”
During the conversation, she also revealed that Ullu will launch a new Hindi GEC.
Revealing this, Basu said, “We are going to launch a new Hindi GEC in future. While I announce this news, you all may think that there’s no space for a new GEC but we see a space. We are coming up with a completely new phenomenon where audiences will get to see OTT type content on TV.”
Taking the conversation to the creators side, Tolia said, “In the initial days, there was a lot of passion to create. But now, as the OTT space is evolving, there’s a hassle to create new content within short deadlines.”
Throwing up the next question to Ken, he asked, “As the industry has taken up a speed, now directors, writers and actors are working on multiple projects at the same time. With this speed, how will enthusiasm sustain?”
Ken answered, “Yes, that’s true, creators are now pacing up, working more than one project simultaneously. But to sustain, industry needs to go slow.”
“There is no need to make fake deadlines and there’s no need to run behind the stars but to invest the right amount of time in the content making process,” he said.
Taking the discussion ahead, he asked Gautam how do we not fall into the trap of just creating content without understanding the needs of the audiences? Gautam answered, “content fatigue is there. It is important to have clarity on who you’re making content for.”
Tolia asked Gautam, “compared to other platforms, MX Player has been extremely prolific. How are you able to churn out the number of shows you do with the same quality?”
Gautam asserted, “We spend a good amount of time, well planned out, and give so much attention to writing.”
Singh, who has closely seen the industry evolve over the last six-seven years, thinks that OTT has changed the dynamics of the industry from revenue point of view, from production point of view and in all other spheres.
He said, “In the last few years, we have only learnt what OTT is! We are just on the tip of the iceberg, there’s a lot to explore. And in the coming years, we have a lot to create and present”.
“We are one-sixth of the population and we are yet to make our own Squid Game, Money heist and a lot more,” Singh added.
Shifting the conversation to the unscripted content on OTT, Bhola said that there’s a lot of space to grow even in the unscripted content space.
Calling herself a radical optimist, she said, “We cannot say that there are no new stories. In fact, this is the best time to create content. However, we need to focus in terms of coming up with new seasons, we need to go slow.”
Concluding her statement Bhola said, “There’s a lot of room to create content in India. We are super rich in terms of culture and we have a lot to create and show to the world.”
Watch the entire panel discussion on The Evolution Of Ott Content: The New Order by clicking on the link here:
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.
