iWorld
ShemarooMe taps into OTT boom with movies and regional content
Mumbai: ‘Warning: Graphic Content’ – because the mind is inclined to do exactly what it’s warned against, and a picture so captioned is sure to attract the viewers’ attention.
ShemarooMe’s recent social media campaign recreated iconic scenes from the movies and ‘graphically’ used the lens of charts and reports to come up with quirky infographics making people smile. Behind the campaign’s minimalistic execution was a deeper insight that stems from Shemaroo’s over five decades of experience and expertise in dealing with content. It also forms the basis of the Company’s content strategy which has crafted the unique ‘movies-devotional-regional’ proposition for the brand in the Hindi web series-dominated Indian OTT space.
Shemaroo Entertainment’s head of marketing, Rahul Mishra tells us that close to 60 per cent of the content on ShemarooMe, which is the OTT platform of the content powerhouse- is movies, with the rest being dominated by devotional and regional (Gujarati). In fact, the brand’s foray into Originals began with Gujarati web series in April this year. Coming back to the movies, Mishra reiterates that it will continue to be the mainstay for ShemarooMe.
“We believe that there is a huge OTT opportunity in India where the audience is seeking different forms of content. However, a large number of them want content that is familiar in terms of the format and presentation. That’s why movies and Bollywood continue to be relevant, and that’s also where our strength lies,” he says.
The Content Conundrum and Nostalgia Economy
Mishra shares that dealing with content over decades has given Shemaroo the understanding that while new formats are instantly picked up for consumption, their popularity wanes after a certain time period. On the other hand, the consumption of an established piece of content that is known to the audience not only stays steady but increases consistently. He cites the example of Shemaroo’s YouTube channel, ‘Shemaroo Filmy Gaane’ to support his stance. With a following of 54.8 mn, the retro music station is among the most subscribed channels.
The ‘Warning: Graphic Content’ campaign is one of the many such efforts by the brand to familiarise the youth with stories and characters that are timeless. Mishra points out that “the familiarity of content and affinity to a particular content piece keeps bringing the viewers back to it again and again, and this has led to the creation of the self-driving/sustaining ‘Nostalgia Economy’.
Building on its huge library of classics as the foundation, ShemarooMe has been bringing in innovative approaches to further the OTT ecosystem ever since its launch in 2019. With regard to films, the brand introduced a TVOD service called ‘ShemarooMe Box Office’ during the lockdown wherein it replicated the theatrical model by bringing in movies every Friday. These included small-budget titles such as ‘My Client’s Wife’, The Least of These’ and ‘X Zone’ that were struggling for a release on account of theatres remaining closed. ShemarooMe also collaborated with the online ticket booking website BookMyShow for this initiative. While the model was born out of necessity, nearly ten films were released under it.
Meanwhile, ShemarooMe came up with a more robust offering, ‘Bollywood Premiere’ which involved world digital premieres of movies coming straight out of the theatres, either after running their due course or prematurely, but not exposed to the audience on any other medium including television. These included the likes of ‘Amma ki Boli’, ‘One Day Justice’, ‘Paharganj’, and ‘Door ke Darshan’. Mishra proudly declares that his team has successfully managed to keep ‘Bollywood Premiere’ running for 100 weeks uninterrupted in these unprecedented times when content production has become a big challenge.
The regional-first approach to Originals
ShemarooMe’s Originals journey began in April this year, with its first regional expansion happening in Gujarat. Being in the Gujarati content acquisition business for over a decade, the Company has established itself among the leaders in the space. Although, it hasn’t dabbled in Hindi originals yet.
According to Mishra, “the two significant features of the Gujarat market are its major overlap with Hindi and the underdeveloped content ecosystem. This translates into a huge opportunity for us. Our mission in this market is a fairly large one; we want to grow the industry by making Gujaratis fall in love with Gujarati entertainment once again.”
ShemarooMe has been aggressively pushing the brand in the state, with one of its brand ambassadors in the market being Gujarati film and theatre artist Malhar Thakar. The app was launched with a direct-to-digital release ‘Swagatam’ which featured Thakar. Ever since ShemarooMe has kept up with the promise of bringing a fresh piece of content every week across formats and genres. The three pillars of the platform’s content strategy for Gujarat include movies (direct-to-digital or digital premieres), original web series, and ‘nataks’ (plays).
Commenting on the significance of ‘nataks’ in the market, Mishra informs that plays have traditionally been part of the family viewing experience for a Gujarati household on weekends. “In the big cities like Ahmedabad, Surat, and Vadodara, and also in Mumbai which has a fairly large Gujarati population, there are auditoriums dedicated to running ticketed Gujarati plays. This is an inherent part of Gujarati culture. While some of these plays are based on authored content, most are slice-of-life with a strong element of humour which resonates with the Gujaratis who are known for their funny side,” he remarks.
Shemaroo has been in the business of filming Gujarati plays and making them accessible for people to watch on their preferred medium – TV, YouTube, and now OTT. Currently, there are over 250 plays on ShemarooMe, and more shoots are being commissioned constantly.
On the business side of things, ShemarooMe has largely been a subscription-driven service so far. Even as the relevance of branded content grows, it has no plans of exploring the advertising model yet. “Given the affluence of Gujarat, many national and regional brands want to associate with us for branded solutions,” asserts Mishra. He is confident that even with the foray into original productions the strategy will work for them in the near-to-mid-term future.
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.
