iWorld
Applause’s Sameer Nair spills the secret sauce for hit storytelling
MUMBAI: At Ficci Frames’ silver jubilee edition, a candid panel discussion between Applause Entertainment managing director Sameer Nair and India Today senior editor and anchor Akshita Nandagopal, brought the house down with humour, insight and a healthy dose of industry nostalgia.
Moderating the fireside chat ‘Scaling stories, earning applause,’ Nandagopal kicked off by asking if Applause Entertainment had cracked the “OTT code,” given its slate of acclaimed shows like Criminal Justice (2019-present), The Hunt (2025) and Black Warrant (2025).
Nair brushed off the idea of any secret formula. “Storytelling is a difficult enterprise,” he said. “You put in all the hard work and finally show it to an audience, sometimes they love it, sometimes they don’t. What we try to do is tell stories that feel real, even if they entertain first.”
Citing his fondness for contemporary history, Nair explained how Applause often draws inspiration from real people and events, and banks on the entertainment factor. Black Warrant, he pointed out, isn’t about the dark underbelly of the Tihar Jail and the inmates as much as it is about “three young people on their first day at work; only, their workplace happens to be the Tihar Jail.” The company’s celebrated Criminal Justice series, meanwhile, has gone far beyond its British and American counterparts. “By the fourth season, we weren’t adapting anymore. We were living in the world of Madhav Mishra,” he said with a grin.
Continuing the conversation on creativity in Indian storytelling, Nandagopal asked Nair, “Creativity is always a buzzword, but sometimes it feels boxed in a certain way. You can’t talk about uncomfortable topics; you have to be mindful of controversy and what entertains an Indian audience. Do you think creativity is constrained like that?”
Amusedly, Nair interjected, noting that this isn’t unique to India. “In the eight years we’ve been doing this, we haven’t really got into much trouble, so we must be doing something right. We don’t have an agenda; we’re telling stories that make you think, but not what to think. We find compelling characters, research their worlds, and present their stories as balanced and entertaining as possible. They are people like you and me.”
He brought up The Hunt as an example, which begins with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi but quickly transitions into a police procedural. “It’s not about politics; it’s about crime and justice… In the process, you get to know the characters. There’s one scene where Sivarasan, the one-eyed LTTE mastermind, sits in a theater watching a Rajnikanth film. We loved putting that in, it humanises him without glorifying anything.”
When Nandagopal brought up the theme of change, both broadly and through the lens of content, Nair noted how some formats have stood the test of time. “KBC is a classic because it has a great format and Mr. Bachchan,” he said, crediting both star power and familiarity for its relic appeal. “Audiences talk about change all the time, but they also love familiarity. Sometimes you don’t want a murder mystery; you just want to relax.” To which, Nandagopal nodded and said, ‘It’s a comfort watch. A lot of us do that. We’ve been watching a lot of the classics that we’ve seen before. Knowing that that’s something that’s predictable. We know what we’re expecting there. And yet we love to watch it.
Looking back at the first Ficci Frames two decades ago, Nair painted a vivid picture of how dramatically the industry had evolved. “In 2005, television ruled everything. There was no Facebook, Twitter or Youtube, even the iphone didn’t exist. By 2015, digital platforms had become the barbarians at the gate. Now, in 2025, we’re minor players compared to Netflix, Youtube and social media. And just as we adjusted to that, AI arrived.”
The conversation soon turned to the elephant in every creator’s room: will AI replace creativity or enhance it? Nair’s reply was measured. “AI will be a great tool if it can create that suspension of disbelief,” he said. “When you see a dinosaur chasing you in Jurassic Park, you believe it. If AI can make you believe without breaking the illusion, it’s magic. But if it looks fake, we might as well be watching animation.”
He added that AI, much like earlier leaps in filmmaking, from special effects to computer graphics, would revolutionise the process but not erase human creativity. “Even an AI actor needs direction, a script and a story,” he said. “If machines create everything end to end, without human emotion, we’ll just be watching something intelligent but soulless. We must use it wisely.”
As the conversation veered back to Applause’s future, Nair revealed that the company has recently acquired the rights to Jeffrey Archer’s books and has a robust slate of upcoming projects. Upcoming projects include new seasons of Criminal Justice and Black Warrant, the next installment of the Scam franchise, and a Tamil feature Bison directed by Tamil director and screenwriter Mari Selvaraj. He also teased Gandhi, a three-season epic inspired by Indian historian and author Ramachandra Guha’s books. “It’s not about Gandhi,” Nair chuckled and said, “it’s about Mohandas before he became the Mahatma: an 18-year-old who goes to college in London, and does all the standard things that rebellious teenagers do.”
For Nair, storytelling remains deeply human: an approach that has shaped Applause Entertainment’s diverse slate, from thrillers rooted in true events to expansive biographical dramas.
In a world where algorithms and art are learning to coexist, it’s a fitting reminder that great storytelling, no matter the medium, will always find its audience.
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.
