iWorld
Prime Video to stream live cricket in India starting 1 January 2022
Mumbai: Amazon Prime Video has entered the live cricket streaming play starting 1 January 2022 with a test series between New Zealand and Bangladesh. In November, Prime Video secured the exclusive live cricket rights from New Zealand Cricket, the governing body for professional cricket in New Zealand.
As a part of the multi-year deal, international men’s and women’s cricket matches played in New Zealand – across ODI, T20, and tests – will be available exclusively on Prime Video.
Prime members will be able to exclusively stream the series between the Indian and New Zealand Women’s Cricket Teams in February 2022, as well as, the Indian and New Zealand Men’s Cricket Teams presently scheduled for November 2022. This is in addition to matches that are presently scheduled to be played between the Men’s teams as a part of Bangladesh’s tour of New Zealand in January 2022, South Africa’s tour in February 2022, Australia’s tour in March 2022, and Netherland’s tour in March/ April 2022.
“Cricket is undoubtedly the most loved sport in India and our collaboration with New Zealand Cricket underlines our commitment to give our customers what they want. The upcoming series will be Prime Video’s first foray into live cricket in India,” said Prime Video India country head Gaurav Gandhi. “The New Zealand cricket -team has built a reputation of being one of the finest in the game and undoubtedly cricket fans in India will be delighted experiencing the exciting sporting action live exclusively on Amazon Prime Video. We are excited to start our live cricket journey in 2022 – an action-packed year that will see both Indian women’s and men’s teams tour New Zealand. Today is truly Day 1 of our sports journey.”
“Starting January 2022, New Zealand cricket has a new home in India – Amazon Prime Video – and we are looking forward to bringing New Zeland’s summer game to our fans and cricket lovers in India as they catch us live on the service,” said the captain of the New Zealand national team Kane Williamson. “India’s love for cricket and entertainment is well-known around the world. I am thrilled that Prime Video will be exclusively streaming all the exciting on-field action to our fans in India.”
“The passion and love of the Indian cricket fan is quite unmatched! The country and cricket fans have a very special place in our hearts,” said the captain of the New Zealand Women’s cricket team Sophie Devine. “With a new, exclusive home on Amazon Prime Video, we hope to engage and delight viewers across the country. I am excited to play against the Indian Women’s Cricket team this summer. They are a worthy opponent, and I can bet it will be an intense cricketing season between our teams.”
“It’s a very exciting time for cricket broadcasting as we move into live cricket being streamed exclusively on a service as widely followed as Amazon Prime Video in India,” said New Zealand Cricket chief executive David White. “Cricket is followed closely in India and our association with Amazon Prime Video will help us extend our reach and connect with fans and followers in the country. We are delighted that the viewers in India will be able to watch all the tours coming up in 2022 live on Prime Video, and look forward to offering all the on-pitch excitement to viewers in an immersive and engaging manner.”
To watch the matches, Prime members can go to the Prime Video app on their respective devices and will see matches shown in a carousel for live cricket or they can search for ‘New Zealand Cricket’ in the search bar.
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.
