iWorld
Eros Now enters into strategic distribution partnership with Vayam Technologies
MUMBAI: Eros Now, the cutting-edge digital over-the-top (OTT) South Asian entertainment platform owned by Eros International Plc, a global Indian entertainment company, announced its agreement with Vayam Technologies Ltd to distribute the OTT platform across districts of Uttar Pradesh through its common service centres (also known as Jan Seva Kendra). Eros Now will be part of Vayamtech's business to customer (B2C) services that provide access to village-level entrepreneurs (VLEs), hosted on its platform.
Eros Now's availability at nearly 20,000 common service centres, one of the largest government-approved online service delivery channels, across 21 districts in Uttar Pradesh will enhance the reach of the leading online video streaming platform and shall cater to more than two million consumers in the rural areas of the above mentioned state.
Eros Now CEO Ali Hussein said, "The alliance between Eros Now and Vayamtech is a result of our common belief in using the power of the internet to offer the best services to customers across India. The people of rural India are increasingly using the internet for their daily needs, and it has now become imperative for businesses to offer rural audiences with seamless access to services. Eros Now's distribution through Vayamtech network of common service centres will offer the massive audience base the best of online video streaming service."
As per the Internet & Mobile Association of India's (IAMAI) report, rural India houses 227 million active internet users, 10 per cent more than urban India's about 205 million, as of November 2019. The association, therefore, acts as a perfect distribution mechanism for Eros Now through common service centres (multiple-services-single-window delivering government and private essential services) that will not only deepen Eros Now's reach in the state but also aims to bring socio-economic upliftment in rural areas.
Vayam’s know-how and familiarity of working for people at bottom of the pyramid extends across multiple states reaching millions of rural citizens. Adhaar Enrolment, Census and Surveys, e-district, CSCs, Facilitation Centres, Banking, Insurance, Product Delivery etc. have facilitated in reaching out to 70 per cent of rural population residing in states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.
Vayamtech executive director Jitendra Tiwari added, "OTT platforms across India are witnessing huge demand and adding Eros Now in Vayamtech's services will result in revenue yielding for the brand by benefiting the customers with easy access to online entertainment. Uttar Pradesh is a massive market and our common service centres across 21 districts in the state is an ideal model for the delivery of the entertainment platform."
Uttar Pradesh is certainly one of the biggest Hindi speaking markets and Eros Now's massive content catalogue comprising over 12,000 Bollywood movies, original shows, short-format content category Quickie, music and more will offer the best of online entertainment experience.
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.
