iWorld
aha Studio and Applause Entertainment partner to produce four bi-lingual web series
Mumbai: Telugu OTT platform aha on Monday launched an independent content and IP creation entity – aha Studio, which has also entered into a partnership with Applause Entertainment to co-produce four premium bi-lingual series.
Their first offering- a web series titled ‘Half-Lion’ will tell the story of former prime minister P V Narsimha Rao. Based on the book with the same name written by Vinay Sitapati, the series will be released in Hindi, Telugu and Tamil, the streaming platform announced at an event held on Monday.
aha Studio will work on projects at a Pan-India level and tell stories that have their origins in the South. The entity will self-finance these projects and license it to various platforms once the production is finished. “The studio is an initiative to create content at an arms-length from the platform. Doing this helps us work with the top talent in the country. We’re looking for projects that have a Pan-India appeal but have their origins in the South, that’s our USP,” said aha CEO Ajit Thakur.
“For us, this partnership is about collaborating with a strong creative and production company,” said Applause Entertainment chief executive officer Sameer Nair. “Geetha Arts is one of the largest content creation companies in South India and have been making movies and series for many years, and they’ve launched the platform aha. In order for us to do bigger, better and brighter things, we will have to collaborate with other content studios. This is not the age of going solo. Lot of creative people should work together on projects.”
Elaborating on the new web series, Nair said, “We enjoy telling stories of this kind. These stories are increasingly being told in the language that they deserve to be told. ‘Scam 1992’ was equal part Hindi and equal part Gujarati. Once we’ve made it, I’m sure there will be a lot of people interested in it because it is an important story to tell.”
The series will be helmed by National Award-winning director Prakash Jha known for his socio-political films such as ‘Gangaajal’, ‘Apaharan’, ‘Rajneeti’ and ‘Aarakshan’ and web series ‘Ashram’. “Hardly a small percentage of today’s generation knows about Rao, the ”man who changed India”. He brought about changes, systems in our polity, economy, society and everyday life in our country which now is completely irreversible,” said Jha.
aha Studio had acquired the rights to the book ‘Half-Lion’ and approached Applause Entertainment that has the expertise in telling layered narratives with an ensemble cast. The content studio headed by Nair recently bagged 12 Filmfare OTT awards for ‘Scam 1992’ their biopic on stockbroker Harshad Mehta.
“It’s been a remarkable journey with aha in Telugu so far,” said Geetha Arts managing director and aha promoter Allu Aravind at the event. “We are overwhelmed with the love and support we’ve received globally from the audience, who’ve made aha one of the fastest growing apps in India within a span of two years. In what is another pioneering effort from aha, we believe aha Studio will help us work with the best creative talent in the country to present world class entertainment to our global audience.”
Telugu OTT platform aha is set to launch in Tamil language next year. The platform which has grown by 13+ million downloads in the last year and a half will increase its content investments in 2022 and launch new unscripted formats including ‘Indian Idol Telugu’.
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.
