iWorld
Budget 2020: BharatNet boost to have positive impact on OTT platforms
MUMBAI: While the media and entertainment industry is heading towards a digital future on the back of streaming services, budget 2020 seems to bolster it. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday proposed to allocate Rs 6,000 crore for the BharatNet programme in 2020-21. The boost to broadband connectivity in rural areas is making OTT platforms hopeful about uptake in online video consumption.
"Our vision is that all public institutions at the gram panchayat level such as anganwadis, health and wellness centres, government schools, PDS outlets, post offices and police stations — all will be provided digital connectivity. The fibre to the home (FTTH) connection through BharatNet will link 100,000 gram panchayats this year itself," Sitharaman said.
ALTBalaji CEO Nachiket Pantvaidya appreciates the step to promote digital connectivity through its BharatNet programme and connecting 100,000-gram panchayats through optical fibre network. According to him, this is one more important step taken in the direction of achieving the vision of a digital India where rural India gets placed on the digital map.
The over-the-top platforms are heavily reliant on internet connectivity for better penetration. Moreover, numerous industry experts and reports have suggested that tier II and tier III cities, rural areas are the next frontier of growth for OTT platforms. Hence, the move will help them to expand more in those markets.
"We appreciate the efforts of the government to boost the digital ecosystem in the country. The increased focus on improving connectivity under the BharatNet scheme and the emphasis on artificial intelligence will allow OTT players to offer bespoke and personalised solutions to consumers. Additionally, the impetus to the smartphone manufacturing industry will make internet consumption accessible to a wider section of Indian society that will expand the scope of revenues for OTT players. The allocation of Rs 8,000 crore for setting up the National Mission on Quantum Computing and Technology will also boost the development of the industry by making resources cost-effective," Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal stated.
“It is now a cliché – “data is the new oil” and it is true that analytics, fintech and internet of things (IOT) are changing the way we deal with our lives. To take advantage of this, I propose to bring out soon a policy to enable the private sector to build Data Centre parks throughout the country. It will enable our firms to skillfully incorporate data in every step of their value chains,” Sitharaman added.
White Rivers Media chief executive officer and co-founder Shrenik Gandhi said that data and digital occupied the centre piece of the budget. He added that the focus on IoT, Data Parks, AI shall make India a strong contender amongst the top digital economies, globally and the ambitious fibre to home proposal should get the next 100 million in the digital universe soon.
“75 per cent of the users that come on to the internet for the first time between now and the next few years are going to come from tier II and tier III cities as per various industry reports and the vast majority of them are regional language native speakers who don’t necessarily converse in English or Hindi as their language of preference. Anything that is done to bring them to the digital foray essentially allows regional platform like Hoichoi to influentially expand the addressable user base over time and this is a welcome move. Next set of users are to be brought in the digital fold and it not just the combination of digital apps that will benefit from this, it’s also the information and social media apps that will benefit from wider availability of the internet at the grassroot level,” Hoichoi co-founder Vishnu Mohta commented.
"Budget 2020's revised fiscal deficit target of 3.8 per cent of the GDP seems more realistic and focus on spends/ benefits was required to boost the economy. The thrust on entrepreneurship and tax regulations for both, startups and taxpayers is a move in the right direction. India is the third largest startup hub globally and the announcement of an investment clearance cell to provide end-to-end support to startup founders will encourage more youth to be job creators. Further, the ability to defer taxes on ESOPs will democratise wealth creation for startup employees, ensuring the right talent is benefitted. Finally, the decision to grant 100% tax exemptions to sovereign wealth funds on their investment in priority sectors will provide the much needed funding boost to the sector and create value in the longer run,” Pocket Aces VP of Finance and Operations Kunal Lakhara said.
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.
