iWorld
ALTBalaji management confident of breakeven by April-June 2020
MUMBAI: Ekta Kapoor’s over-the-top platform has managed to solve the OTT revenue question. The ALTBalaji management always spoke of profitability and breaking even rather than cash-burn and tons of investment and it seems that aspiration will soon be achieved.
The management at Balaji Telefilms remains relentlessly upbeat about lowering the recorded loss in the balance sheet gradually. In the third quarter, it stood at about Rs 16 crore. As shared with investors in an earnings call, the management is optimistic to bring it down to single digit in the fourth quarter. “April-June onwards we will practically breakeven the ALT business,” the company says. It also mentions that the breakeven is at the P&L level.
Before September 2019, ALTBalaji shows were available for free on telco services. The indirect customers were yielding very low average revenue per user (ARPU) bordering between Rs10 to 15. The platform last year entered in a deal with ZEE5 also. All 42 shows which were produced before September are exclusive to ALTBalaji and the 13 co-produced shows on both platforms. Due to the changes, now all ALTBalaji content is behind a paywall, be it on its own service or on ZEE5.
“This has enabled us to one raise our ARPU. Secondly we have direct subscriptions going up, as a result year-on-year. We are doubling our subscription revenue overall and also through direct subscribers, so that is the benefit of going behind paywall. We feel that as our library increases we need to ensure that people form the habit of paying for our content and our content is not offered free. We had to do telco deals and give it off free in the first, probably 30 months of our existence because our library was small, but now we have taken a call, now with the library is growing that we are going to go only behind paywall,” the management reaffirms.
The revenue has gone up this quarter too which stood at Rs 23.1 crore in Q3. The management thinks numbers are looking more and more cheerful in terms of the topline. It attributes it to two factors – one, the exclusive 42 shows and the ZEE deal. Because of the deal, it has been able to manage P&L and revenues.
“It is a 60-40 content share, 60 per cent of our content cost is picked up by ZEE and I think on an annual basis that will amount to at least about Rs 80 crore to 90 crore and the rest of the money that we spend on the apps has to be made by us directly through our exclusive live and show that exploit and as a result of that we hope to breakeven between 36 to 48 months from our launch,” the management states.
The management is very confident that its direct subscription revenues are doubling every year. At the closing of this financial year, it estimates the figure to stand well above Rs 31 crore to 32 crore . It is also expecting to double direct subscription revenues next year as well. Moreover, the two-year ZEE partnership will also span most of the next financial year leaking into the year after.
“We want to be the only OTT platform in the country that has broken even that too with a considerable base of originally-produced shows. We are now the number one store house of originally produced Hindi content in country and we will also demonstrate that we are able to market our shows exclusively better than everybody else because our efficiencies are better. We are achieving this at a much lower marketing spend than the competition,” the management says.
“That is reflected in the fact that we are consistently in the top four gross billing OTT apps on the Android and the iOS web store pick any month in the last 12 months we will always be in the top four, though our rate to the consumer is probably one of the lowest it is Rs 100 for three months and Rs 300 for a year."
"What we are therefore setting to establish is that there is a mass market, which we are successfully able to target and operate a profitable OTT business with the topline of about Rs 150 crore to Rs 200 crore in the coming two financials,” it adds.
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.
