iWorld
Budget 2020 proposals offer few benefits to M&E industry: EY India
MUMBAI: As always, the industry's hopes from union budget 2020 were high. According to a report from EY India while the budget proposals offer few benefits to the industry, some of the changes may have a material impact which will need to be assessed.
“The budget proposals will provide relief to the foreign companies earning income such as license fees from making compliances in India, provide clarity and do away with avoidable tax litigation through reduction in withholding tax rate for technical fees as well as withholding tax provisions for e-commerce operators. New media and digital business qualifying under start up incentives will get additional impetus from the measures proposed. Reduction in newsprint import duties will help print industry which is going through a tough business cycle. Tax amnesty scheme for resolution of pending litigation offers an opportunity to reassess the tax game in the country,” the report adds.
The report states that the proposed alternate personal tax regime will be relevant to mass employment by the industry in its content production processes, however, it is difficult to determine whether the regime will provide a material differential cash surplus to the employed.
It also adds that expansion of domestic tax regime will lead to tax uncertainty for foreign companies with no resource to any credible advance ruling mechanism which will allow them to understand their tax position upfront.
“Removal of exclusion relating to theatrical receipts would certainly put pressure on the finances of the film businesses with a 10 per cent withholding tax rate and increase their compliance burden. The uncertainty attached to film business certainly makes a strong case for a rate much lower than applicable 10 per cent withholding tax rate. Increase in import duties will lead to increased cost for businesses,” it adds.
Key impacts:
· Withholding tax rate on “fees for technical services” reduced from 10 per cent to 2 per cent, reducing potential litigation on withholding tax rate on content production services and certain other services which do not qualify as “professional services”.
· Exclusion of consideration from “sale, distribution or exhibition of cinematographic films” removed from “royalty” definition that may make theatrical and other receipts from exploitation of cinematographic films taxable and subject to withholding tax at 10 per cent.
· Expansion of domestic source rule will bring to tax income of a nonresident from (i) advertisements targeted at a customer located in India
(ii) sale of data collected from a person in India and (iii) sale of goods or services using data of customer located in India.
· The list of services subject to Equalisation Levy provisions remain unchanged.
· Exemption provided to non-residents earning royalty and fees for technical services from the requirement of filing a return of income, subject to fulfilment of stated conditions.
· Relief provided d to the print industry by reduction in customs duty on newsprint and paper.
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.
