iWorld
Roposo launches live entertainment commerce
Mumbai: With an intent to disrupt the mobile and online commerce space, Roposo on Thursday announced the launch of a digital destination for creator-led, live entertainment commerce. According to a statement, the new offering will enable consumers to shop for top-notch products in real-time within a live, virtual mall environment.
Shoppers on the Roposo will now be able to discover products recommended by creators through entertaining live streams, visit hundreds of creator-led pop stores, and get up close and personal with some of their favourite stars. While shopping across categories such as fashion & beauty, health & fitness, electronics, home décor, and lifestyle, they can simultaneously attend live events by some of Gen-Z’s favourite creators. Roposo will enable multiple features for social interactions on both sides of the screen in its live streams, the platform said in a statement.
Going forward, creators can also have the opportunity to monetise their expertise by conducting paid masterclasses, and through ticketed live shows such as music concerts, stand-up comedy, talk shows, and fashion shows.
“While we have several big celebrities, the real hero for Roposo will be creators; be it the young fashion designer from Mangalore who wants to live-stream her collection on the platform and sell nationwide through her own pop store, or the indie rapper from Punjab who wants to reach millions through a ticketed concert,” stated Roposo vice president and general manager Mansi Jain. “We intend to be the platform of choice for enterprising creators, who are not only great entertainers, but are experts in their domain, have authentic connections with their audience, and are skilled at influencing buying decisions.”
For its creators, Roposo will integrate a wide range of monetisation levers on the platform. Besides creating live experiences, they will be able to run their own multi-brand pop stores on the platform. With opportunities to go live on Glance lock screen, they can potentially have access to Glance’s user base of over 150 million in India alone, said the statement.
In June this year, Glance had acquired the full-stack e-commerce platform Shop101. A business unit of Glance, Roposo intends to leverage Shop101’s technology, comprehensive supply chain infrastructure, and vast experience in managing end-to-end digital shopping to drive its commerce proposition. Glance also recently launched Glance Live which brings users some of the best of live content from across the internet on the lock screens of their smartphones. Roposo will be one of the major content developers on Glance Live.
“Our intent is to build the largest platform for creator-led live shopping in India, and take it to Southeast Asia and the USA in the coming quarters. There is rising global demand for immersive shopping experiences that closely replicate the offline world, online,” stated InMobi Group co-founder and Glance president & COO Piyush Shah. “As we have seen in other markets, live streaming commerce, conducted by talented creators, is becoming a successful way to meet that demand. With Roposo’s popularity amongst creators, the scale and Live stack of Glance, and the e-commerce infrastructure of Shop101, we are well poised to take this new Roposo experience out in a big way.”
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.
