iWorld
Eros Now expands existing partnership with BSNL
MUMBAI: Eros Now announced that it has further expanded its existing partnership with the state-owned telecommunications company Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), with a core focus of entertainment on demand consumption in tier 2 and tier 3 markets of India.
This launch of bundled subscription vouchers further strengthens Eros Now’s reach by bundling subscriptions and launching three new BSNL special tariff voucher plans that will provide consumers access to a wide variety of online content. These subscription vouchers are both affordable and convenient as consumers can save on subscribing to video streaming platforms without compromising on the entertainment portfolio offered by Eros Now.
BSNL offers its massive customer base with varied choices to choose the best tariff pack, and this alliance with Eros Now enables the telecom company to provide access to online entertainment. Eros Now is bundled for 24 days on the prepaid recharge pack of Rs 98, while the value of Rs 298 has Eros Now for 54 days and another pack of Rs 1,999 for 60 days that customers can choose from.
These prepaid recharge packs are a doorway for consumers to access Eros Now’s massive content catalogue including 12,000+ movie titles, original shows, music videos, short-format content – Eros
Now Quickies and much more. BSNL, which has a strong foothold in the heartland of India, further entices its existing customer base and potential customers by offering the best of entertainment available on Eros Now.
A recently-published Ovum-Amdocs report indicates that as many as 50 per cent of mobile users are willing to pay for a premium media service via their carrier bill if offered at a discount or with an extended free trial. These opportunities benefit both cellular telecom players as well as OTT platforms that generate a meaningful amount of subscription revenue through bundled offers.
Commenting on the development, Eros Now CEO Ali Hussein said: “India’s rural market is increasingly exploring entertainment options on the go. BSNL is one of the strongest telecom players in India and offering Eros Now’s entertaining content library to the customers is a step further in fulfilling audiences’ growing appetite for OTT. These numerous special tariff packs attract different customers who have varied choices and expand our reach by connecting with the heartland of India.”
BSNL director (CM) Sushil Kumar Mishra added, “Entertainment has been one of the key drivers to attain greater reach in the telecommunication industry in recent times; the trend will only grow in the years to come. We at BSNL always strive to provide customers with unparalleled services at an affordable price. The three-pack subscription vouchers offering Eros Now content allows the audience to explore the best of online video streaming service and its huge content library of entertainment.”
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.
