iWorld
Liongate Play’s June offerings: Cosmic Sin to Blood Circus
Mumbai : Lionsgate Play, one of the fastest-growing OTT platforms in India, is now showing unmatchable content across various genres in June. Lionsgate Play has announced an impressive line up of the biggest blockbusters for the Indian audience.
Indiantelevision.com presents you with a list of six movies that audiences may watch on the OTT platform.
Cosmic Sin
Cosmic Sin is a high voltage sci-fi action thriller starring Bruce Willis and Frank Grillo in lead roles. The film is set in the year 2524, where humans have colonized other planets. At this point in time, retired general James Ford gets called back into service following a hostile alien fleet attack on soldiers located on a remote planet. The threat against mankind soon escalates into an interstellar war as Ford and his team of elite soldiers try to stop the imminent invasion before it is too late.
Directed by Edward Drake, this movie is produced by Corey Large. Apart from Willis and Grillo, the film also stars Brandon Thomas, Corey Large, Perrey Reeves, CJ Perry, and Lochlyn Munro in other prominent roles. Cosmic Sin is available on Lionsgate Play in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada.
Unlocked
Another action thriller from the Lionsgate store is Unlocked. Directed by Michael Apted, this British-American film revolves around CIA agent Alice Racine who fails to apprehend the terrorist behind a Paris attack that claimed dozens of lives. She is then working under cover in London when her mentor drafts her into an operation in which she has to stop a deadly terrorist attack.
Written by Peter O’Brien, Unlocked stars Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, Michael Douglas, John Malkovich, and Toni Collette in lead roles.
Warm Bodies
Warm Bodies is an American paranormal romantic film directed by Jonathan Levine. The film is based on Isaac Marion’s 2010 novel by the same name, which in turn is inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Analeigh Tipton, and John Malkovich in lead roles, the film is set in the backdrop of a terrible plague that segregates the population between zombies and humans.
Liberty Stands Still
Blade hero Wesley Snipes’ 2002 movie Liberty Stands Still is a high voltage crime thriller. Directed by Kari Skogland. The movie revolves around the life of Liberty (Linda Florentino), a gun manufacturer’s wife who is held hostage by Joe (Wesley Snipes) who has lost his daughter in a high school shooting incident.
Liberty Stands Still will be available on Lionsgate Play on 25 July.
The Glass Castle
The Glass Castle is an American biographical drama directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. The movie narrates a heart-wrenching story about a dysfunctional family. The Glass Castle stars Brie Larson, Naomi Watts, and Woody Harrelson in lead roles.
The film will be available on Lionsgate Play on 18 June.
Blood Circus
Directed by Jacob Cooney, Blood Circus is an American action film that revolves around the life of a retired MMA fighter caught up in a deadly underground fight club called Blood Circus. To protect his family, the MMA fighter has to win the fights against deadly enemies. The film stars Jamie Nocher, Tom Sizemore, and Robert La Dardo in lead roles. Blood Circus will be streamed on Lionsgate Play on 11 June.
The app is available on :
Desktop- https://lionsgateplay.com/
IOS- https://apps.apple.com/in/app/lionsgate-play/id1532066585
Android- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lionsgateplay.videoapp
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.
