iWorld
Disney+ stays put on subscriber guidance despite overwhelming response
MUMBAI: There was a widespread high expectation for Disney+ and the streaming service had more than 10 million sign-ups by the end of first day. Within a few months of its entry, Disney+ acquired 28.6 million paid subscribers surpassing all previous estimates. Although the media conglomerate seems excited with the positive response, it is not changing the guidance currently.
“We’re just beginning there, and I think it's just premature for us to take our guidance up. What we do know, of course, is that we have reached a number in the United States that since you did the math that would suggest that we're at the number that we predicted we would be in year five, just after a very short period of time, and I don't know whether that is a statement about the total available market or the quality of the product or both, or the price. It is just the way I think a number of factors that I've touched upon, and I just – I'll go over them one more time,” Disney chairman and chief executive officer Robert Iger stated in an earnings call.
While Disney projected between 60-90 million global subscribers by 2024, it counted on two-thirds of that from subscribers outside the United States. As the streaming service has not been launched in most of those markets, Iger said it is more of a challenge to launch in those markets and needs more marketing efforts. Although the interest in streaming is not as high as US in those markets, he mentioned that these markets have been seeded with streaming.
The platform saw 50 per cent of subscribers signing up directly while Verizon partnership made way for 20 per cent subscribers. Rest of the subscribers came from other services including Apple, Google, LG, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony and Roku. Moreover, the bundle with ESPN and Hulu was very helpful in terms of lowering churn rates.
“The fact that the ARPU by the end of the quarter was $5.56 on a $6.99 subscription suggests that while there were discounts in the market in the packaging that existed enabled consumers to buy in at lower prices. We did extremely well, basically with the Direct-to-Consumer Package,” Iger added.
As Igers shared, users have adored the offering of classic movies and shorts from the studio including Moana and Frozen, Disney Channel series like Hannah Montana and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, recent theatrical releases like The Lion King. Along with old library, subscribers have shown interest to growing slate of original content especially The Mandalorian which has “quickly become a bonafide hit and a cultural phenomenon”.
“We know there is great anticipation for the substantial array of Baby Yoda consumer products hitting the market in the coming months. We'll continue to add high quality content to the service that includes Frozen 2, and Episode 9, The Rise of Skywalker. Many of you probably saw our Super Bowl spot featuring three original new Marvel series for Disney Plus. Loki, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which will premiere on the service in August and Wandavision, which will debut in December,” Iger stated.
However, the trajectory in terms of investment in original programming on the service is roughly the same as it would have been or as was before the launch. The company has not brought significant change in the investment.
Although Disney is working up a plan to take its other streaming service Hulu internationally, it has decided that the priority needs to be Disney+. It is going to be launched cross multiple territories in Western Europe, and India on 29 March. Following that, it is going to continue to roll out across the world going into 2021 including Latin America. Hulu’s international expansion will come right after or soon after that.
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.
