iWorld
Biiggbang Amusement announces its first collaboration with Assorted Motion Pictures with the award-winning film, Rikshawala
As the world is keeping up with the hustle and challenges of the new normal, Biiggbang Amusement is here to help its audience with a few moments of entertainment, cheer, and laughter with its unconventional content slate. The OTT platform specializes in bringing forth the most compelling stories within minutes for its viewers. With the thought to bring entertainment anytime, anywhere, Biiggbang Amusement announces its first collaboration with Assorted Motion Pictures with the award-winning film, Rikshawala. Breaking the bandwagon, the platform aims to curate critically acclaimed short-form content in one place.
The short-film entices its audience to think and throws light on an often overlooked sect; the Riksha-pullers. The film is laced with undertones of realism and portrays a simplistic sense of storytelling, similar yet distinct from Ram Kamal Mukherjee’s former projects. Set in the backdrop of the city of joy, Kolkata, Rikshawala features talented actors like Kasturi Chakraborty, and Avinash Dwivedi that add special elements of life to the story.
This fidelity and simplicity is being loved by audience across the world, helping Rikshawala getting selected for the esteemed Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival, aimed to recognize the enlightening, entertaining and progressive new age cinema of youth and experienced filmmakers. The critically acclaimed short-film has also successfully brought back the award for the Best Human Rights Film at the Cardiff International Film Festival, while its talented director, Ram Kamal Mukherjee also won the awards for the Best Director at International Film and Television Entertainment Award, Australia and the Rajasthan International Film Festival.
Sharing his thoughts on the brand’s first collaboration, Sudip Mukherjee, CEO and Founder, Biiggbang Amusement quoted, “While the world is in shackles of the pandemic, we are all looking for a breeze of hope and positivity. We at Biiggbang Amusement aim to help our audience with this by bringing them relatable and meaningful stories, anytime and anywhere. While the upper-crust of the audience consumes English content widely, we are looking at seeping through the crust to reach every viewer, countrywide with distinct languages and genres catering for every niche. We are proud to associate with a talented creator like Ram Kamal Mukherjee and Assorted Motion Pictures to inscribe the first short-film on our content slate. We plan to populate our content library profusely with many more masterpieces and award-winning shows and films like Rikshawala.”
Sharing his thoughts on the premiere, Avinash Dwivedi shared, “Rikshawala is definitely a milestone for me and all the accolades including the award for the Best Actor at the 13th Ayodhya International Film Festival, and the awards at Cardiff and Melbourne have truly given me a boost as an actor. I was really excited about working on this project right after I heard the narration from Dada (Ram Kamal Mukherjee). Before meeting him I was a little nervous about his seniority but after meeting him, he made me feel very comfortable and we became friends at an instant. Every aspect from the film is relevant and touching. I could really connect to my character in the film. He is someone who would do anything for his family and really loves his profession to the core. The film will make you think, and will touch you in ways that you won’t forget. While I was comfortable with the Bhojpuri dialogues, Bengali isn’t a language that I’m very familiar but I did want to give it a shot, so I ended up dubbing both; Bhojpuri and Bengali dialogues in the film.”
Excited about the premiere, Kasturi Chakraborty said, “Being a part of Ram Da’s film Rickshawala was both enriching and inspiring. It takes a hard look at the lives of the people who struggle in their own way to get what they want. In the case of my character, she goes through the sweet torture of heartbreak which is something I have deeply felt personally. Ram Da had a vision for each of us and he encouraged us to take that journey into the lives of our characters to attain spotless authenticity. I think it is the unfiltered portrayal of the reality of the people in the film and his vision that made it worthy of all appreciation globally. It’s great that the film now will be available on Biiggbang Amusement for all the cinema lovers globally.
Commenting on this collaboration, Ram Kamal Mukherjee, Director & Writer, Rikshawala, shared, “Rikshawala is a unique love story with a special twist. It is a project that is really close to my heart, and what makes it relevant is the humaneness and realism of the characters. I am also overwhelmed with such a positive global response and all of these awards and accolades are truly encouraging and I strive to tell many more of stories embedded with realism and relatability. It was an amazing experience to work with talented actors like Avinash Dwivedi and Kasturi Chakraborty who gave their sweat and blood to make their characters alive. I spotted Avinash at a birthday party in Juhu while Kasturi is a known television face, and I instantly knew that they’re perfect for the roles I had in mind. I am also really excited about my very first collaboration with Biiggbang Amusement and take pride to be a part of their content library of carefully curated content.”
The riveting short-film also made its way to the ImagineIndia festival held at Madrid and Spain, and also fetched laurels including the Best Actor and Best Director award at the 13th Ayodhya International Film Festival. Biiggbang Amusement is set to launch soon and is gearing up with a competitive and unequalled content slate aimed at entertaining, inspiring, and amusing its audience across the globe.
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.
