iWorld
Zee5 Global unveils fresh content line-up for April
KOLKATA: As we wind up the first quarter of the year, Zee5 Global has unveiled a fresh new line-up of content. Viewers can choose from a variety of Zee5 Originals, television shows, and non-fiction shows to enjoy their summer at home.
Leading the April line-up is the much-awaited Zee5 Original Film Raat Baaki Hai starring Paoli Dam, Anup Soni, Rahul Dev, Dipannita Sharma and Akash Dahiya. Set to premiere on 16 April, the film is a remake of the popular play Ballygunge-1990, and has been directed by Avinash Das and produced by Samar Khan of Juggernaut Productions. The film revolves around a fateful meeting between two ex-lovers under strange circumstances: one of them is running away from the law for being a murder suspect.
Zee5-ALTBalaji Original web series Mai Hero Boll Raha Hu starring Parth Samanth, Patralekha and late Asif Basra will drop on 20 April. Taking the viewers through Nawab’s rise as an underworld don in the late 1980s and 1990s, the intriguing drama documents how an amazing friendship and mentorship quickly turns sour when Nawab outperforms his mentor Lala. Next in line is His Story, a Zee5-ALTBalaji Original series starring Satyadeep Misra, Priyamani and Mrinal Dutt in lead roles. The Hindi series premierses on 25 April.
Zee5 Tamil Original Film Mathil revolves around Laxmikanthan, a common man, who fights against a politician who usurps the wall of his dream house for an election campaign. Starring Mime Gopi and KS Ravikumar, Mathil releases on 14 April 2021 (Puthandu, the Tamil New Year); the trailer is already out.
Viewers can also enjoy a special Ramadan curation from 12 April onwards with a variety of delectable festive recipes from celebrity chefs Kunal Kapoor, Sakshi Batra and others. Furthermore, the platform will stream some of the most loved family movies, TV shows and Originals for audiences across markets. From Shabana Azmi’s Mee Raqsam to primetime legacy shows Razia Sultan, Jodha Akbar and popular originals including Daawat-e-Biryani, Jaadu Kadai and more.
For Zee Tamil viewers, the platform is set to celebrate the grand success of Yaradi nee Mohini and Poove Poochudava crossing a landmark 1,000 episodes – the first ever shows to do so, with Vetri Vizha on 11 April.
Zee Bangla viewers can enjoy a new fiction TV show Amader Ei Poth Jadi Na Sesh Hoy, where a rich girl Urmi decides to become a taxi driver, in an exciting journey of self-discovery and independence. Slated to be released on 12 April, the show stars Anwesha Hazra as Urmi. Zee Bangla will soon premiere Dance Bangla Dance Season 10, judged by Bollywood celebrity Govinda and popular Bengali superstar Jeet and Ankush. The exciting Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Bangla gears up to stream the grand finale on 18 April.
Zee Punjabi viewers can celebrate Baisakhi with Neeru Bajwa and top Punjabi artists and TV stars in a special episode on 10 April, while in the popular Punjabi cooking show Swaad Aa Gaya, viewers can celebrate Baisakhi the whole week.
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.
