iWorld
ShemarooMe launches Box Office, a platform to release new movies directly on Digital
KOLKATA: With the unprecedented times and restrictions on movements especially across entertainment activities and with the unavailability of theatres has all led to the film circuit in India to look at newer ways to cater to the entertainment needs of movie enthusiasts. In line with this, ShemarooMe announced the launch of ‘ShemarooMe Box Office’, a platform that gives cinema curators/producers an opportunity to unlock the true value for their films by offering them access to digital avenues like never before.
ShemarooMe Box Office is poised to create an ecosystem for small budget Bollywood and Regional movies that have an audience but limited avenues to reach out to the viewers. To widen the scope of relevant audience reach for such films, ShemarooMe has also inked a strategic partnership with BookMyShow, India’s leading entertainment destination to ensure more cine-goers have access to the rich content made available by ShemarooMe.
ShemarooMe Box Office is the right platform which gives an opportunity to the producers, to not only present their creations to a whole new set of audiences but also gives viewers a chance to enjoy small budget, critically acclaimed movies at the comfort of their homes. Viewers can book their tickets for these films by logging on www.bookmyshow.com or directly on the ShemarooMe App or www.ShemarooMe.com. Once booked, users can watch the film on ShemarooMe any number of times over three days from the booking period.
Under this business model, Shemaroo will market the films to a wider audience base and build awareness about the new releases. This will further assist film producers to unlock newer monetization opportunities for the films as well, and post the viewing window on ShemarooMe, these films can be offered to Satellite, SVoD and other syndication avenues as well. Thereby creating an opportunity for producers to extract value on the back of heightened visibility and content appreciation through this transparent model along with providing real time reporting of ticket sales to the producers. ShemarooMe Box Office hence is an ideal solution to the temporary challenges faced by the entertainment industry. On one hand viewers get access to some of the most critically acclaimed movies while on the other the producers get to unlock a new set of audience that matches the TG of these films.
Commenting on the launch, Shemaroo Entertainment Limited CEO Hiren Gada said, "During these trying times when moviegoers are missing watching new releases in theatres, we are glad that we can bring home some great releases. With ShemarooMe Box Office, we are creating a model for the film industry and audiences. Our association with BookMyShow will further redefine the consumer movie-going experience and bridge the gap for cinemagoers across India. We are absolutely confident that when cinemas are able to reopen safely, the public will once again respond to the unsurpassable big-screen experience, meanwhile our platform will be bridging the gap by entertaining audiences thereby living by the traits of Shemaroo being the platform for movie lovers at all times.
Adding to the launch, Shemaroo Entertainment digital COO Zubin Dubash said, “Covid 19 has made every organisation, innovate at the speed of light. ShemarooMe Box Office is an innovation that helps not only one organisation but the entire ecosystem – viewers get to watch new releases, producers get a transparent platform for release, ticketing partners get a model for the new normal. And ShemarooMe ensure it lives up to its promise of entertainment at all times.”
BookMyShow Cinemas COO Ashish Saksena said, "We are glad to partner with ShemarooMe to bring cinematic entertainment to the comfort and safety of audiences' homes. We look forward to keep bringing newer options to experience entertainment for all our users.”
My Client’s Wife will be the first movie to premiere on ShemarooMe Box Office on the 31 July 2020, featuring Sharib Hashmi, Anjali Patil and Abhimanyu Singh followed by award winning film – Scotland, Sharman Joshi’s drama entertainer – Graham Staines Ek Ankahi Sachhai The Least Of These based on true events and action thriller packed movie – The Hidden Strike are sure to keep audiences glued to their screens.
The digital first release of movies as a concept has been accepted globally by patrons and will soon become a trend amongst Indian audiences as well. With the launch of ShemarooMe Box office, the company is all set to partner with producers and introduce new movies on the platform. The brand new initiative by ShemarooMe will have two legged benefits where they are sure to satiate the needs of all the Bollywood buffs with new releases and will also definitely give a boost to the entire film industry by opening newer avenues for unreleased movies to be showcased.
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.
