iWorld
OTT platforms gear up to resume production
KOLKATA: The Covid2019 crisis struck India in March and the entertainment industry came to a standstill. While TV production resumed in July, shooting for film and original content remained on pause for a lot longer. The industry, which lost six months of valuable production time, is slowly limping back to sets and studios.
More people may have switched to over-the-top (OTT) platforms during the pandemic, but on the flip side, it has inflated the audience’s appetite for content. These streaming services have maintained a steady click of new releases so far but the constrain of shooting large scale projects is a major concern.
Experts predicted that the pandemic would affect the pipeline of long-format premium originals till the first half of FY22. Although most major players have resumed filming, no one is certain how soon full-fledged production will be back on track.
Netflix co-CEO and chief content officer Ted Sarandos said during the recent ET Global Business Summit Unwired 3.0 that getting back to production safely tops the organisation’s list of priorities. This, however, has been particularly challenging in India, he said.
Not surprising, considering the country is leading the highest number of daily positive cases; this problem is further compounded by the strict rules and guidelines imposed by the Maharashtra government on film production. But Netflix fans, fear not; more than ten Netflix India productions are scheduled to start in November.
Desi OTTs
The homegrown players are also stepping up their efforts to keep the content flow alive. MX Player already has one show on the floor and will be pushing a few more projects into production by end of October, chief content officer Gautam Talwar said.
“Given the pandemic, audiences are spending more time online and OTT platforms including ours have seen a sharp increase in engagement, emerging as the preferred choice for content consumption. To cater to this rising demand, we’ve launched over 27 shows from March until now. We still have a couple of shows in the pipeline that we have shot which are currently in post-production; you should see those releasing over the next quarter,” Talwar added.
ALTBalaji has also resumed filming some of its shows with minimum staff and in restricted places with appropriate permissions. ALTBalaji CEO and Balaji Telefilms group COO Nachiket Pantvaidya assured that they are diligently following all the requisite standard operating procedures.
“We recently launched ten episodes of Bebaakee on ALTBalaji. Shooting is ongoing for the show and we will release more episodes soon. October onwards, audience will see a host of shows, including Mumbhai, Bicchoo Ka Khel, Dark 7 White, LSD, Who’s Your Daddy Season 2, Kahin to Milega to name a few,” Pantvaidya stated.
Amid regional players, Bengali OTT Hoichoi started production back in August since West Bengal initiated Unlock prior to most other states. Hoichoi co-founder Vishnu Mohta revealed that the platform has already completed shooting for seven projects. Two of the post-pandemic shows are already streaming on Hoichoi while others will be gradually made available to users.
Despite production challenges, hope remains
Even as India’s Covid2019 tally is flirting with the 70 lakh-mark, stakeholders in every segment of the industry remain hopeful while adjusting to the new normal. Hoichoi’s Mohta said they are trying to restrict the shoots as much as possible to indoor locations, and make sure to sanitize the entire set very carefully before starting work. Despite all the constraints, things are looking up; it has become easier to get schedules and dates of famous actors and directors, he divulged.
ALTBalaji’s Pantvaidya admitted that since production has to abide by a number of precautionary measures, the work is going slower than before. Nevertheless, with shooting gradually resuming, he is optimistic that viewers will have a handful of shows to look forward to in the coming months.
A leading producer who wished to remain unnamed commented that safety measures and longer timelines are stretching already-limited production budgets.
Pantvaidya expressed the view that shooting at a full-fledged scale is still going to take some time due to the current situation. He said that the platform’s focus is making sure everything works out smoothly, with the safety of cast and crew being top priority.
“We’ve all started by putting our best foot forward – keeping in mind precautionary measures and complying with social distancing norms etc. To my mind, full-fledged production as of right now looks like it will only start by January 2021, when multiple shows can be put on the floor, hopefully without too much worry,” MX Player’s Talwar said.
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.
