iWorld
Disney+ Hotstar’s ‘Multiplex’ to pit OTTs against each other
KOLKATA: An unprecedented crisis has compelled producers to re-imagine the film distribution model suddenly. As theatres remain shut across the country, producers are developing camaraderie with over-the-top (OTT) platforms. While Amazon Prime Video was the first OTT platform to go aggressive over digital premieres of films, Disney+ Hotstar is taking the trend forward with the launch of Disney+ Hotstar ‘Multiplex’. From July, it will premiere seven Bollywood movies for its subscribers and this might escalate the conflict between producers and multiplex owners.
Disney+ was scheduled to launch in India during IPL 2020 which later got postponed due to the Covid2019 pandemic. The rebranded Disney+ Hotstar could have emerged a clear winner on the back of India’s most popular sporting event. Now, it is banking on another segment which has crazy fandom – Bollywood.
“At Disney+ Hotstar, we firmly believe in pushing boundaries to achieve the unexpected. A few years ago, we took an audacious step of bringing sports closer to people by streaming it LIVE on mobile devices – a move that forever changed the course of LIVE sports in India. Today as we launch Disney+ Hotstar Multiplex, we find ourselves yet again at the cusp of making a revolutionary change by bringing the biggest Bollywood movies directly to millions across the country,” The Walt Disney Company APAC chairman and Star and Disney India president Uday Shankar said in a press statement.
The belief was that only small budget movies would go to OTT and the big ones would want the ROI via theatres. But as Shankar launched the service alongside top Bollywood stars such as Alia Bhatt, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn and Abhishek Bachchan, that idea is bound to change.
“Any OTT player who is releasing films will see a significant increase in subscribers. Usually, movie-going costs for a family range between Rs 1000-2000 depending on which city and where they are watching the movie. Against that, they can always subscribe to platforms like Disney+ Hotstar at a lower price and get done for the year. Hence, there will be a new set of consumers who will come on these platforms. If somebody becomes a subscriber for a movie, they will continue for other content once and the platforms will acquire subscriber for a lifetime. So, the tectonic shift in movie-release business is going to be a big win for OTT players,” says PwC India media, entertainment and sports advisory, partner and leader Raman Kalra.
Experts believe the move will dramatically increase the subscriber base of the service even as Media Partners Asia projected it could have 25 per cent of the total online video revenue pie by 2025. After Disney’s acquisition, Hotstar has grown personalisation and search functionality as the platform has invested in scaling its premium entertainment proposition.
Even though the tussle between OTT and multiplexes will continue, Shankar said that they both will grow together. “Even when films started releasing on TV, theatres grew. Digital premiere will give a new life to the industry. We have 500 million mobile screens in this country right now where films can be watched. If we can reach out to them, it will be a great outlet for the industry to showcase its creativity and tell stories. We should not see this as a short-term tactical compromise, we should see as a big leap for our film industry,” he said during the virtual press conference.
Kalra also believes that the audience will love to go back to theatres once everything settles downs. But a parallel set of movies will be produced keeping OTT platforms in mind. However, he, too, believes that both sides will have enough demand in the market given the lower screen density in India.
“We thought why not use the opportunity of the pandemic to create a big, alternative world of exhibition, and create a network of virtual theatres – private theatres – in everybody’s homes, and that is what we are doing today,” Shankar said.
This also leads to another question. Will such mega launches spell the death knell for smaller OTT players? Kalra thinks these international players and homegrown players always have had a different strategy. If more people flock to these larger platforms, the latter will definitely have enough demand if they make content and monetisation strategy focusing on the kind of subscriber they want to target and accordingly give them the expected experience.
“It will create a contest between various OTT players particularly negative for the likes of ZEE5 and Amazon Prime Video which have focused more on originals,” says SBICap Securities institutional equity research head Rajiv Sharma. “It will have some serious short term implications and is a matter of concern for multiple players because they have been overlooking participating in the digital value chain.”
The conflict started when Amazon Prime Video acquired the rights for Gulabo Sitabo. Then came the stunner that Akshay Kumar’s Laxmmi Bomb would be released on Disney+ Hotstar. Not to mention that the upcoming movie of late actor Sushant Singh Rajput, Dil Bechara, will be the move that flags off the Multiplex service.
“Competitive intensity may increase now among OTT players also. This will have a cascading effect as the contest to chase movies and delay in the opening of malls will continue to add to producers’ problem as they will have to focus only on digital to generate revenue,” Sharma adds.
Kalra agrees that there might be disappointment coupled with a lot of debate and discussion. While he, too, says that in the long-run, theatres and digital screens will co-exist, he believes the theatre owners will also have to change the business model keeping the need for contactless experience in mind.
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.
