iWorld
Will MIB crack the whip on online content: Experts debate
KOLKATA: It's been an oft debated issue over the past few years: how does one keep a tab on free as a bird, digital sector – OTT and digital news platforms? With the government bringing it under the regulatory oversight of the ministry of information and broadcasting (MIB) many a conservative who has complained about the content on streaming services may well heave a sigh of relief. But it is exactly this which is creasing the brow of many a digital executive as they wonder now if their creative freedom is about to be curtailed with the leash of a draconian censorship law. But experts believe there is no reason to panic at the moment.
They say that so far, the matter of digital content regulation was neither here nor there, dangling between the MIB and ministry of electronics and information technology (MEITY). The government’s move was aimed at drawing lines and clearly defining what comes under whose ambit. According to industry experts, MEITY has less knowledge about content and was also not very active in the sphere.
“There is certainly a need for some kind of regulation. If self-regulation is adopted, exercised, and disciplined, that would have been ideal. That’s what the industry had signed up for some time back. Putting everything under censorship would be one extreme step which could be very difficult for the industry to work on as the OTT segment is a very different business in terms of content, infrastructure, investment, and challenges,” said PwC India media, entertainment & sports advisory partner a& leader Raman Kalra.
He went on to add that there would be a need for the government to work in very close consultation with the various stakeholders in the industry and arrive at a middle ground. “You can’t have a completely unregulated environment. On the other hand, you can’t have a very tightly controlled censorship driven framework,” he quipped.
Elara Capital VP – research analyst (Media) Karan Taurani conjectured that the ministry may be formulating a framework for regulating the OTT space but that may not be very anti-digital in nature.
Since the industry cannot be left unregulated, the government’s gazette notification will ensure that the entire media ecosystem will be aligned in terms of processes and overview under MIB, commented former SonyLiv head and Kurate Digital Consulting’s Uday Sodhi.
“It is still early days to predict the impact. I think it has done the re-categorisation and recognised OTT as a proper medium and therefore put it under MIB. This is the right way to go about. It basically integrates the entire content ecosystem whether it is entertainment content or news, whether it is digital or TV,” he added.
In terms of censorship, Sodhi was of the view that change in ministry will not change the Centre’s take on the matter, which has been a hot button issue for a while now. But he believes that MIB will not impose any censorship, rather it will follow the self regulation model in traditional media.
On the subject of investment in the OTT sector, Kalra stated that it will be affected if – and only if – there is a heavy regulatory environment. The harder it becomes to create a good content funnel, the slower will be the growth of the sector. However, he qualified his statement by saying that it’s still early days. On the other hand, Taurani claimed this will not discourage global OTT giants from investing, or impact the streaming sector negatively in a big way.
“We look forward to working with the ministry to implement our industry's self-regulation efforts. As responsible content creators, we want to ensure this act not only takes cognisance of the nature of content being released, but also ensures that we safeguard creativity in this rapidly growing sector,” MX Player CEO Karan Bedi clarified.
On a slightly different note, another senior media professional added that the move is aimed more at the news segment. The good part, he said, is that MIB will now be able to keep a check on fake news and foreign companies’ control over news determination. But he cautioned against the misuse of power as well. Things will get sticky from a political point of view if the action turns out to be ‘A vs B.' However, the ministry will need a piece of huge machinery if it really tries to monitor every piece of news content.
With an increasing number of services getting into streaming – and some have content which can be construed as crossing the line of decency by a sensitive India today – it behooves the mainline streaming players to quickly come up with a self regulatory mechanism which is acceptable to the MIB. Also, those streamers who have not signed on the dotted line, need to arrive at an agreement with those who have. So far the fledgling sector's efforts to come up with self-regulation under the IAMAI have not really excited the regulator.
Advertisers, agencies, and entertainment and news broadcasters have – in their time – got together, buried their differences and drawn up mechanisms which have kept audiences, and the government satisfied. OTT and digital outlets need to keep a picture in their minds: being forced to run to the censor board for every piece of content that they produce, should they fail to get a self regulatory code in place. That's a nightmare no OTT executive would like to go through.
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.
