iWorld
FanCode turns one as India’s first multi-sport aggregator platform, garners over 15 mn users
MUMBAI: FanCode has successfully completed one year with over 15 million app installs. Since its inception in March 2019, FanCode has partnered with some of the world’s biggest sports brands and events, it has brought sports content to India across 9 sports and over 50 sporting events.
FanCode is a multi-sport aggregator platform from the house of Dream Sports. It has also launched the ‘fastest interactive live scores’ experience and comprehensive live streaming of long-tail sports and some premium cricket tournaments.
In the last one year, FanCode has significantly enhanced the sports experience for fans by providing interactive data overlays during live streaming of a match, news on the sports industry across the globe, bite-sized video content like match highlight packages, chat with sports personalities in a new-age format, and expert opinions.
The latest offering to the fastest live scores for cricket is now delivered with multimedia commentary. This is supplemented by interactive content and infographics for milestones achieved by players or teams during the match and also a detail-oriented ‘Live Blog’.
Adjudged as the “Best Sports Startup” at FICCI India Sports Awards 2019, FanCode forged over 16 exclusive partnerships with leading global sports associations and leagues across sports such as cricket, football, kabaddi, basketball, volleyball, and even American football.
Some of the key partners include The Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB), West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), Bangladesh Cricket Board for showcasing the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL), National Football League (NFL) including the world’s biggest annual sporting event – the Super Bowl, and I-League. It also became the NBA's (National Basketball Association) first live streaming partner in India.
FanCode co-founder Yannick Colaco says, “We are thrilled at the tremendous progress that we have made in just a year. Over 15 million strong users in one year is an indication of how Indian sports fans are looking for deeper and comprehensive engagement with the sports they love.”
“We plan to launch several innovative and exciting features for sports fans. We will also continue to build FanCode to provide the best-in-class experience that sports fans deserve even during a time when sports across the globe have come to a halt. The reliance on digital platforms to stay connected to sports has further increased acceptance for the platform, and we expect consumption of sports to reach its peak once live sports are back,” adds Colaco.
FanCode co-founder Prasana Krishnan says, “The dependencies on digital mediums are significantly growing in sports over the years, thanks to the easy access to smartphones and cheaper data. The internet made access to interactive sports content a reality including live streaming, live scores, match analysis, fantasy research, which have been the strong pillars of growth over the year.”
“To stay true to our objective of being the single destination of choice for the avid sports fans in India, we are all set for the next phase of growth with feature additions, right from e-commerce to fantasy research tools. Forging deep and direct fan relationships will be a crucial differentiator in the long run for the industry, and we are building this base for the next leap,” adds Krishnan.
FanCode was launched in March 2019 to offer a broad spectrum of long-tail sports and contextual commerce providing comprehensive sports experience to avid sports fans in India. Dream Sports, a sports tech company, is the parent company of FanCode that also houses brands like Dream11 and DreamX.
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.
