iWorld
Juggernaut Productions’ Samar Khan shares his untold experience in making Avrodh: The Siege Within
Director and producer Samar Khan, who is known for his critically acclaimed war drama film Shaurya, is now busy creating stories for streaming platforms. Almost one-and-a-half years after Vicky Kaushal's Uri: The Surgical Strike, SonyLiv has come up with a series named Avrodh: The Siege Within.
Based on a book written by Shiv and Rahul, Avrodh showcases what exactly happened during the 2016 surgical strikes conducted by the Indian Army in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The former journalist is passionate about creating stories for armed forces as most of his work like Regiment Diaries on Epic channel, The Test Case, or the AltBalaji-ZEE5 series Code M revolves around the same subject.
In a special discussion with IN10 Media Network's production arm Juggernaut Productions chief operating officer (OTT) Samar Khan gives more insights on the show.
Edited Excerpts:
Avrodh is based on Shiv and Rahul’s book. So, how did you conceptualised the show?
I have always been intrigued by stories of armed forces. Before Avrodh I have made Shaurya and Test Case. I picked up Rahul and Shiv Aroor’s book and was taken aback after reading the first chapter. I also spoke to the authors and realised that they were also very interested in making its OTT version. We all felt that the book deserved to be made in a series rather than a film. Post this, I immediately approached Applause Entertainment’s Sameer Nair with the idea, and he was equally convinced about it. So that is how we went ahead with this concept.
It looks more like a quasi-documentary style of a contemporary action film. So, do you think it would have been better if it was a documentary than a series?
No, not at all because the concept is more dramatic in its storytelling. It is now a show that can be made in a documentary style. We always believed that the dramatic storytelling format would be the best way. I don’t think anyone was confused about the route we wanted to take. I think a series would do justice to it. The documentary is a different part of storytelling. I am not saying that it would not have been effective for this show. It is just that we have picked another way of storytelling. There are already many.
Were you scared that people would take it as a jingoistic show? How have you maintained the line between jingoism and patriotism?
We were proud of our story, and we wanted to show the story in the way it has happened. We were clear about telling a story of bravery, and we wanted to show it as humanely as possible. I come from NDA background and have friends in forces with whom I interact on a regular basis, so I know the way they think and operate. Our entire team had just one single aim of creating a human story. In my opinion, the show doesn’t have any jingoism elements.
Where did you shot the story?
Initially, the plan was to make a 10 episode series, and we had the goal to expand the world of the book. The book talks about the surgical strike, so we picked up the story even before the Uri attacks happened then later in the show, we showcased Uri attacks and then the ten days that led to the surgical strike. So initially, we thought to name the series as ‘10 Days’. We researched about what political establishments were doing and how the planning was done. The actual scripting process took eight to nine months. It was important for us to stay true to the story, but we did take some cinematographic liberties. One of the most crucial things I and Applause Entertainment decided to do was to bring the director of Neerja movie Raj Acharya. That was one of the best decisions we took. So, later on, we brought the team on-board, then the casting process happened. Amit Sadh was our first choice because we share a similar thought when it comes to the army. We brought on board some of the esteemed names from the film industry like Neeraj Kabi, Darshan, Anant Mahadevan, and Vikram Gokhale.
We also received great help from the Indian army as they provided us with the locations, places to shoot, and equipment. We submitted the entire script to them for approval. They were also part of storytelling. We found locations in Bhadarwa, located in Jammu, and then we shot in Mumbai and some parts of Delhi. We spent a lot of time in talent scouting for junior artists and other actors. We did army training with them, taught them how to hold a gun, and how to walk, talk, and salute like army men. We had an ex-army man as a trainer who helped us in designing the look for the boys. It was important for us to maintain the authenticity and real look of the show. We fabricated and made guns like the real ones. But the Bofors, trucks, Jeeps are from the army.
The music perfectly magnifies the chaos of war in the series. Can you elaborate more on this?
A lot of credit for music goes to Deepak Sehgal and Priya Jhavar from Applause Entertainment. I think between Raj Acharya, Sehgal, and Jhavar the background music got reworked several times. Nirmal Pandya also kept on innovating with different tools and instruments. We didn't want the background music to look more like jingoistic or patriotic.
Also, in the commercial cinema, audiences are served with a bouquet of things which included crime, romance, drama, and thriller. Do you think streaming platforms have changed this scenario?
We are now able to tell stories in a more defined and chiseled way. I think we don't need to unnecessarily fill up the story with everything. Apart from streaming giants, I would also like to give credit to audiences. I believe it is not important to have everything in one story. It is fantastic that audiences have also evolved; they can enjoy things without fitting everything into one.
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.
