iWorld
ZEE5 launches progressive web app to increase reach by 5x
MUMBAI: ZEE5 has turned its mobile website into a Progressive Web App (PWA) to increase web reach by 5x. The refreshed version of mobile web app will help users add ZEE5 icon to their home screen, instant and smooth page loading in poor network areas, quick user interaction for a smoother experience, hassle free offline browsing and works without difficulty on mobile devices with low storage.
Being country’s largest producer of original content, which offers 100+ originals in 12 languages across genres, it was a natural progression for ZEE5 to turn into a PWA and offer seamless content viewing experience for consumers on the go. Earlier this year, ZEE5 had announced a slew of announcements with leading technology start-ups from Israel that accelerated the superior technological experience it wanted to bring to its 8.9 million peak DAUs who consume content on our platform. The PWA version of the website is now made possible due to the tie-up with Kaltura player, allowing users a brand-new immersive web experience of the robust content library on ZEE5.
The updated PWA version of the platform will allow users to access 1,00,000+ hours of content seamlessly. Since it is a lighter form of an app, the player loading will be faster than before. Other advantages which PWA brings to the fore are overcoming issues such as poor network connectivity and low device storage. This technological advancement by ZEE5 will play a key role in enhancing the consumer experience by carrying out all functionalities of a full-fledged app.
ZEE5 India CEO Tarun Katial commented, “We are in the business of entertaining India on-the-go, 24×7. After changing the content game in the Indian OTT ecosystem, we were keen to bring an incomparable viewing experience that can complement both our largest library of content in the country as well as the wide array of users who log on to our platform from all corners of the country. PWA (Progressive Web Application) is a fantastic model because it loads faster and does not require space on the phone. In tier 2 and tier 3 towns, where many users’ phones are not as equipped with the right hardware, people have lesser space on their phones and comparatively slower data connectivity. PWA version of our mobile web will enable the content to be loaded instantly and smoothly even in poor network conditions. We will continue to invest in creating original content, high-tech and big data to meet India’s ever-growing demand of consuming content in their preferred language on ZEE5.”
ZEE5 India head technology Tushar Vohra said, “PWA stands in between native apps and a website, providing the smooth and seamless experience of a native app while allowing the benefit of not taking any space on the device. We have developed an agile and lightweight compute platform, reducing the first paint impression duration from 30+ seconds to 10 seconds on a slow 3G network, a reality in Indian Telecom. Our experience has seen that the premium audience prefers to consume content via mobile web rather than the app, and this makes it even more important for us to provide consumers with a superlative viewing experience that will do justice to the superior screens they will access it from. Now with the payment gateway embedded into the new version, there is literally no compulsion for even our SVOD viewer to log onto our app. We are confident that every viewer will be spoilt for choice and experience henceforth on ZEE5.”
ZEE5 has rolled out 100+ originals so far (Feb 2018 to Nov 2019) across genres, and the platform is committed to launching 15-20 OCs by March 2020. It has crossed 100 million+ downloads since launch on the Play store and has recorded a peak 8.9 million DAUs as of September 2019.
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.
