iWorld
79% Indians prefer bundling of streaming services: Amdocs-Vanson Bourne Survey
Mumbai: Amdocs, software and services provider to communications and media companies, on Wednesday, released the findings of its latest Streamer 2021 report which surveyed 1,000 consumers in India about their streaming and subscription services preferences. The data revealed the respondents’ inclination towards mega bundles comprising content and communications services.
According to the report, 76 per cent of all surveyed consumers expect to add to their current subscriptions video streaming services, wellness and e-health, and e-learning services, in that order of preference. Consumers have explored the vast array of content and services available to them, discovering that there are plenty of offerings that stretch beyond the satellite/cable and video streaming status-quo.
When asked how their live and on-demand consumption habits are set to change compared to the last 12 months, over two-thirds (69 per cent) of consumers expect the overall time spent on it to increase in the next six months from the current average of 14 hours per week.
Customers are also showing high levels of interest in mega bundles comprising content and communication services: The next generation of bundles will still allow consumers to control key aspects such as subscription management, with user settings being controlled centrally for an added level of privacy. Just under four-fifths of respondents (79 per cent) would be interested in a bundle of video streaming, entertainment, and communication services, followed by multiple video streaming services (73 per cent), and video streaming and communication services (72 per cent).
Quality of content is a major loyalty driver (71 per cent), which trumps even attractive prices (45 per cent).
Customers want to create their own content package. The call for a packaged bundle continues, even as most customers cite that they would prefer to create and pay for a content package that is limited to content that they are interested in versus paying more for access to the provider’s entire library. This is most likely to be the case for consumers if they can pick content that can be accessed across video streaming services (69 per cent), satellite/cable (67 per cent), music streaming services (61 per cent), and gaming (55 per cent).
Customers also shared that if they could create a ‘perfect’ bundle of their subscriptions, they would be most likely to pay more to include on-demand binge-worthy TV series (56 per cent), all games for one specific sporting team (49 per cent), virtual classes/training (46 per cent) and fitness classes with a ‘celebrity’ trainer (45 per cent).
“The pandemic has led to increased consumption of media and entertainment services,” said Amdocs Media GM and chief commercial officer, Raman Abrol. “Availability of multiple streaming options under one roof has resonated well with the comfort levels of consumers who are confined at home and on the lookout for new means of entertainment. As we know that the customer is the king, this is an exciting opportunity for service providers to give them the option to bundle their services where they can access all their media and entertainment subscriptions in one place.”
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.
