iWorld
Every platform needs a centrality to its content: VOOT’s Gourav Rakshit at Vidnet 2019
MUMBAI: Viacom18’s digital venture VOOT is set to expand the horizon of its business with new moves such as the upcoming launch of its subscription-based model in this calendar year and the full-fledged commercial launch of VOOT Kids. While it will maintain equal focus on the advertising-led platform, Viacom18 Digital Ventures COO Gourav Rakshit thinks it is an opportune time to enter the SVOD play.
At Indiantelevision.com’s Vidnet 2019, Rakshit spoke on industry issues as well as VOOT’s content strategy going forward in a candid fireside chat with Indiantelevision.com founder, CEO and editor-in-chief Anil Wanvari. Wanvari set the tone of the discussion by asking his lessons from Shaadi.com and his view on the industry as an outsider.
Rakshit said that Shaadi.com was obviously a fascinating journey for him as he gained more insights on the history of India and communities of the country. It also helped him to touch India at a very core level while they signed up about 10-15k people every day which largely represents middle-class India.
“I think from a learning point of view one of the things I can definitely bring is data science and AI models being used in match-making. They are very advanced. People talk about recommendations on OTT space. So, the order of magnitude of the algorithm on Shaadi is much higher than you have to in this space. Another thing is we ran the entire business on subscription model creating sufficient value to reach premium customers.”
However, he also shed light on the new things he had to face as he switched industries. “I did underestimate the long-gestation period of content between concept, and execution or original launch. At Shaadi.com we were one week away from the idea of execution. This industry has to think where the ball will be one year from now. So, it definitely has a layer of complexity,” he added further.
The other challenge is the supply-demand quotient. There has been a sudden burst of appetite but the growth in content creators can’t keep pace. However, he believes this is a short-term problem.
According to him, the OTT industry is still finding its footing. The industry also has to discover the right price points. “As you start to move from the extremely western psychological demographic to what we call India, then Bharat, the nature of the content that we produce and we are going to put on these platforms needs to be fundamentally different. There, I think the broadcast industry, which has sharpened over years of understanding what these consumers want, is going to have an edge both by virtue of the library of content and understanding the sensibilities of the users. In the near term, clearly, the highest disposable income is with people that have a westernised psychography,” he said.
He also added that every platform needs a centrality to its content that people want to consume and pay for. “We do daily digital soaps which are only available online and do exceedingly well. We have a base of extremely loyal people. In fact, we just concluded a season a few months ago. It is called Silsila and that had a massive fandom. So appointment-driven viewing on the internet as opposed to the only premise we are able to which is binge-watch is where we see a compelling case,” he also noted.
Rakshit noted that the one thing that digital offers but television is unable to provide is on-demand viewing. According to him, if consumers are able to choose when they want to watch something then they can choose what and how they want to watch, and then they will be looking for something which is closer to their own liking. Hence, there has to be an understanding of writing what these new-age consumers are looking for.
According to Rakshit, VOOT has an interesting content line up that is ready to hit the market. Moreover, the entry of fibre-to-home services will also help the platform at an ecosystem level. He also mentioned that as the industry progressed, the price discovery of subscription-based services would also be helpful for the platform.
Speaking on VOOT’s kids’ strategy, he said, “It’s a departure from pure-play video streaming and primarily because we recognise that the target group in that is in the age group of 4-8 years and they are not using their own phones. They are using the device of their parents with their explicit permission. As a form of engagement, we got multiple-choice questions, audiobooks sort of narrative as well as large-format books which people can read in electronic media. Our early indications are that parents like 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.
