iWorld
Amazon Prime Video launches #TheFamilyManJobHunt
KOLKATA: As we inch closer to the release of the new season of the eagerly awaited Amazon original series – The Family Man, Amazon Prime Video has launched an innovative engagement initiative with India Inc. and startups to stir-up the excitement quotient for the series.
Titled #TheFamilyManJobHunt, this unique influencer campaign follows Srikant Tiwari’s (Manoj Bajpayee’s character in the series) quest for a new job, with him being interviewed by business stalwarts like Ritesh Agarwal, founder & chief executive officer of OYO Hotels & Homes, Manu Kumar Jain, vice president of Xiaomi, Kabeer Biswas, chief executive officer & co-founder of Dunzo and Ankur Warikoo, co-founder of Nearbuy. The engagement initiative picks up from last season’s story-arc where Srikant faces an uphill task of finding a decent desk job for himself, having just quit TASC (a fictitious arm of the Indian intelligence agency) to spend time with his family.
Kick-starting the digital campaign, lead actor Manoj Bajpayee took to his social media to share that Srikant Tiwari has finally chosen to be an ideal Family Man and is on the lookout for a corporate job. His post triggered a round of fun and quirky conversations among fans, celebrities and social media influencers who replied to his tweets with bizarre job recommendations. Industry leaders like Ankur Warikoo (Nearbuy), Kabeer Biswas (Dunzo), Ritesh Agarwal (OYO) and Manu Kumar Jain (Xiaomi) are seen joining in the fun banter as well, proposing to interview Srikant. What follows are a series of interesting virtual interviews with these renowned business leaders that has created quite the stir in the corporate world and even amongst internet users.
Nearbuy co-founder Ankur Warikoo said, “Srikant (Manoj Bajpayee’s character in the show) is a super talented guy. (I) would have loved for him to be part of Nearbuy. Not sure why the reference checks aspect of his interview made him get all weird. Love such talent, sad he could not join us!”
Dunzo CEO & co-founder Kabeer Biswas said, “Working with The Family Man team has been a thrilling experience much like the show itself. It was a natural extension for Dunzo – through the pandemic, our team has worked to keep Indian citizens safe. No mean-feat, if you think about it! Just like Srikant, we have had to balance multiple priorities. As we continue to deliver essentials across the country, we’re sure that the series will deliver on the intrigue and entertainment it did with the first season. And Srikant, the job offer is always open!”
Xiaomi vice president Manu Kumar Jain added, “It was an absolute delight to collaborate with the team of Amazon Prime Video for the upcoming season of The Family Man. It was great to have Srikant interview with us. He promises to be a high performing individual both on reel and in real life much like Mi TV, India’s no. 1 smart TV brand. We are confident that with the passion he has, the new season of The Family Man will continue to be one of the most popular shows amongst the audiences.”
Amazon Prime Video India, marketing director Sushant Sreeram said, “As India’s much loved video streaming service, we have had the opportunity to build immersive worlds for our viewers with blockbuster series like The Family Man. A big part of building that on-going relationship with our viewers is to bring elements from reel life to real life and vice-versa. Srikant Tiwari (being) on a job-hunt is just that – a much loved character doing something many of us have experienced in real life. We had a ball working with leaders of some of the most exciting startups in the country right now, putting together this fun job-hunt campaign for our customers. Who is going to hire the not-so-minimum guy? Tune in to Amazon Prime Video on the 4th of June to find out!”
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.
