iWorld
SonyLIV, Applause Entertainment announce first Tamil original ‘Iru Dhuruvam’
MUMBAI : Startled at the sudden disappearance of his wife Geetha, Viktor an astute cop gets cracking on the case. But as he probes deeper, a series of gruesome murders put the entire city in panic leaving him in a predicament. What will he do next? SonyLIV, India’s first premium video on demand (VOD) platform along with Applause Entertainment, a venture of the Aditya Birla Group announced the launch of their first Tamil original ‘Iru Dhuruvam’ premiering on SonyLIV.
Produced for Applause Entertainment by Pramod Cheruvalath’s Sign of Life Productions, the show which means ‘bipolar’ is directed and written by M Kumaran. The show begins with a series of horrific murders that put the city in a state of shock and chaos overnight. It turns out to be the work of a serial killer who quotes couplets from the “Thirukkural” (a classic Tamil text) as clues, leaving everyone at sixes and sevens. Inspector David Viktor, a hawk-eyed cop is assigned to hunt down the killer. But what happens when the hunter himself becomes a prey? As Viktor gets embroiled deeper into this strange turn of events, little does he know what lies ahead for him. While investigating the brutal murders, he himself is under the scanner for his wife’s mysterious disappearance. Is there a connection between these two events? Will this investigation lead him to his wife? The gripping series will see inspector Viktor encountering all details that will put him at crossroads of his professional and personal life.
Running over 9 episodes, Iru Dhuruvam features actors Nandha Durairaj – one of the first popular Tamil actors venturing into the OTT space post a hiatus, Abhirami Iyer – former Miss Tamil Nadu who is a popular face in the Tamil web space, the young YouTube sensation Abdool and popular theatre and film artist Sebastin, Anisha in lead roles of this nail-biting web series, that is sure to leave you on the edge of your seat and hooked on till the end.
Iru Dhuruvam is SonyLIV’s second content offering for its Tamil audience. Post its foray in the market in May 2019, the platform recently launched the Tamil version of its marquee show Crime Patrol with actor Ganesh Venkatraman that has got the audience talking. With tailormade stories like Iru Dhuruvam, Crime Patrol, My Marappu, Cookies and the upcoming Tamil original Aivar amongst others SonyLIV plans to pique the interest of its Tamil audience by engaging them with localised content rooted in Tamil traditions and sensibilities. Additionally, some of the most popular shows from SonyLIV include TVF originals such as Pitchers, Permanent Roommates, Tripling, along with over 40 iconic shows from Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN) content library like CID, Patiala Babes, Ladies Special, Aladdin, Beyhadh amongst others are available in Tamil to the audience for a customized entertainment experience.
Uday Sodhi Business Head Digital Sony Pictures Networks India said, “This partnership with Applause Entertainment blends our in-depth consumer understanding with their finesse in storytelling. With ‘Iru Dhuruvam’, we plan to scale up our Tamil offerings and be the go to OTT destination for the local audience. In a cluttered market like India, such collaborations are a leap towards an evolved ecosystem and will strengthen our promise of delivering cutting edge stories in the digital space. We look forward to a long term and fruitful association with Applause Entertainment as we collaborate to diversify our content offerings for the region.”
Sameer Nair, CEO, Applause Entertainment said, “India is a mass of niches and at Applause we want to build a diverse content repertoire to appeal to every audience palate. The launch of ‘Iru Dhuruvam’ is a step towards that direction. It marks our foray into regional content and is the first Tamil original partnership for Applause Entertainment and SonyLIV. We are excited to associate with SonyLIV and commence our journey of localized content through this show.”
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.
