iWorld
hoichoi is now available on PatchWall on Mi TVs
MUMBAI: hoichoi, a leading Bengali entertainment platform with over 2,000+ hours of content, is now available on PatchWall on Mi TV, India’s number 1 Smart TV brand by Xiaomi.
This partnership was announced earlier this month along with four Mi TV 4X series ahead of hoichoi’s 2-year completion in the industry. Since then, Hoichoi has been rolled out to all Patchwall users across India. All Mi TV customers across India can access their favourite content on hoichoi which offers a variety of Movies, Classics, recently released Films (as World Digital Premieres), Original Series, Music Videos and much more. hoichoi will be providing Bengali content to over 2 million customer-base of Mi TV being the sole Bengali (regional) platform on PatchWall currently.
The new Mi TV 4X (65) is the flagbearer of the new Mi TV 4X series, with a large 163.9cm HDR LED display with Xiaomi’s in-house VPE (Vivid Picture Engine), and more. The Mi TV 4X series has been announced with an aim to bring 4K for everyone; it comprises of its flagship Mi TV 4X (65) along with Mi TV 4X (50), Mi TV 4X (43). The series is also the first in the world to come with Google’s Data Saver Mode. The new generation of Mi TVs are powered by a new and refined version of PatchWall based on Android 9 Pie, designed specifically for the Indian market while retaining support for Google Assistant thus enabling universal voice search, PatchWall now provides a large selection of latest content: 700,000+ hours of digital content across 18 different content partners.
As hoichoi completes two years of Business Operations, one of the focus points for the 3rd year is ensuring seamless availability of hoichoi content on multiple devices, especially on TV screens. hoichoi is already available on Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, and Roku App. Mi TV is a recent addition to their repertoire.
Commenting on the partnership, Vishnu Mohta, Co-Founder of hoichoi, said: “PatchWall allows seamless integration of hoichoi on all Mi TVs where users can choose the interface (English or Bengali) to watch their preferred content. As hoichoi is an audience-first platform and we believe in delivering not only the content of their choice but also the devices they prefer, Mi TV comes as a wonderful addition to our library of devices which will keep growing according to the needs of our consumers.”
Eshwar Nilakantan, Category Lead – MiTV, Xiaomi India said, “With our content first philosophy, we hope to bring each Mi TV user a unique experience with a personalised interface. All this and much more is possible with PatchWall inbuilt into each Mi TV. hoichoi has been synonymous with ground-breaking regional content for the digital medium in the East and we are extremely proud to have brought them on-board with their high-quality immersive content offerings for all our Mi Fans. We hope to build great properties together. Mi TV offers over 700,000 hours of content and hoichoi is a very important partner who share similar brand philosophies as Xiaomi in terms of disrupting respective industries.”
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.
