iWorld
Creative content, diversity, smart recommendation engine & community building are key to UGC platform growth
MUMBAI: While the last few years have seen the rise of online premium content, several consumers have also emerged as creators. The boom of user-generated content (UGC) has led to the adoption of a plethora of apps other than traditional video-streaming platforms. UGC platforms are here to stay but those need to focus more on personalisation, user information security, smarter recommendation engine and scaled up technology.
Under The Content Hub Tech Series umbrella Indaintelevision.com hosted a virtual roundtable on the topic which saw Firework head of content and strategic partnerships Sudarshan Kadam, Roposo co-founder and VP product management Glance Avinash Saxena, Samosa Labs founder and ex-CEO Abhilash Inumella, Bolo Indya co-founder and CEO Varun Saxena, Akamai Technologies director of products – APJ Media Rishi Varma, Zee5 business head expansion projects and head of products Rajneel Kumar, moderated by Indiantelevision.com founder, CEO and editor in chief Anil Wanvari.
The moderator started the session by charting out basic differences between over-the-top (OTT) platforms and UGC platforms. Akamai’s Verma pointed out that the biggest difference between UGC and OTT is the amount of content where the former trumps. He stated that on an average day, some of their UGC consumers individually can have 25,000-30,000 concurrent people broadcasting at any given point in time. While it comes to short videos, they are to the tune of a few millions every minute.
Bolo Indya’s Avinash Saxena said that one of the fundamental difference is the users holding power when it comes to UCGs. Along with showcasing talents, users can create multiple opportunities for themselves, even taking financial capital out of it. Inumella mentioned that the proliferation of smartphones has made it easier for common people to create content, leading to a boom in UGC. However, the panellists also noted that having different use cases, OTTs and UGCs can’t be looked at as contenders.
Interestingly, one of the largest OTT platforms in India, Zee5, will soon venture into UGC. It is prepping itself for its entry into the segment through Hypershots. ZEE5’s Kumar said that the platform has been moving away from two primary types of content, catch up TV and original content in several categories like music videos, live TV and news, consistently over the last year. He noted that it's gaming platform partnered with Gameloft has seen upto six sessions a day per user each eight-minutes long, cementing its decision to work on UGC.
One of the major concerns for UGC platforms is content processing and monitoring content so it does not offend anyone. Firework’s Kadam said that it has AI, ML and human moderation for any content goes up on the platform. He added that whenever they see content is flagged by their system or moderation team, they go through the content to see that it is not hurting anyone’s sentiment. Since the platform is available across countries, it also keeps track of country-specific guidelines and sometimes opts for geo-blocking. Bolo Indya’s Avinash Saxena and Roposo’s Varun Saxena also spoke of multi-layered content monitoring. The former added that if the content is flagged they may not necessarily always remove from the platform but restrict to a certain community.
The experts agreed that content security is not a big concern for UGCs as they want to grow by getting their content shared across multiple platforms. However, impersonation and manipulation of content can be damaging for the platform. As the platforms have a long run ahead, experts believe more creativity of content, smart recommendation engine, diversity and community building will be key to growth. Even UGC platforms can look at the subscription model if they can add value to basic service while Firework already experimented with such a model.
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.
