iWorld
OTT video can bring about cord-cutting in India sooner than expected
MUMBAI: Despite the popularity and endless love for movies and catch-up content among Indian consumers, original content is emerging as an important category for online video viewers. However, traditional content categories like movies and related content like catch-up TV content dominate the current consumption trend on online video viewing probably due to limited supply of originals in contrast to library content.
In a report by Eros Now and KPMG India based on a survey carried out among 1458 OTT users in 16 cities of India, it has been revealed that 10 per cent of respondents prefer watching original content online given the current availability of the category standing at less than one per cent of overall content. Moreover, the preference for original content was consistent among all age groups proving that the category is no longer limited to millennial audience. The survey also revealed that 30 per cent of respondents prefer original content while 22 per cent prefer catch-up content.
“If you look at television, there are hundreds of channels, there are 8-10 Hindi GECs and in each language there are multiple GECs, each channel targeting same consumers. In a situation like that, there isn't any major differentiation in the content being offered. The question at this stage of evolution of digital platform is that you need to differentiate against other platforms or TV. Right now the effort is to take time away from TV to OTT because the consumer has a limited time available on hand,” KPMG India media and entertainment partner and head Girish Menon commented in a press meet.
“It came out in the survey that most consumers are using these platforms to consume catch-up content. Therefore the same level of brand awarness that exists between TV channels is existing between the platforms at this point because majority of the content is library content. If you see the content that is being consumed other than movies it is TV content, sports and original content. Original and exclusive content will trigger cord-cutting also,” he added.
The study also emphasised on the fact that freshness and uniqueness of content are the key determining factors for installation and uninstallation of apps along with respondents subscribing to platforms as nearly 87 per cent of the respondents install an app considering the quality of content.
30 per cent of the respondents prefer watching content in languages other than Hindi and English. The preference for content consumption is significant in the native languages across large parts of the country, with South India observed to be the most loyal to their native tongue.
Online video platforms are truly going mass as the Indian OTT viewer spends approximately 70 mins per day on online video platforms, with a consumption frequency of 12.5 times a week i.e. more than once a day. Viewers are also accessing ~2.5 platforms at a given time. While the customer sets are fairly heterogeneous, there is a trend of homogeneity that was observed in terms of consumption frequency and duration across age groups, income levels and genders.
The report also revealed that OTT video could usher in cord cutting sooner than expected. While 38 per cent of the respondents could consider cord-cutting in the future as they responded to their entertainment needs being fully met online, 14 per cent of the respondents considered subscription to online video platforms as an alternative to TV subscription.
“Cord-cutting because of regulator set up, quality of content, VAS, that transition in India will potentially jump the curve in the US,” Eros Now COO Ali Hussein said in the press meet.
The importance of telco platforms for the distribution of online video content has again been proved in the survey as three out of ten respondents viewed online video on telco platforms. Jio TV emerged as the platform with the highest usage with Airtel TV being a distant second. The report also added that integrated telco billing is one of the factors that is likely to help drive VOD subscriptions in the future despite the fact that SVOD users preferred dire usage of specific platforms.
"It benefits immensely. I am getting subscriber, money, time-spent, viewership. 80-85 per cent of this country will continue to be bundled market because of the price consciousness," Hussein added.
OTT is increasingly becoming anywhere-anytime phenomenon as nearly 87 per cent of the respondents consumed content on their mobile phones, with nearly 28 per cent of the respondents consuming content during the traditional office hours of 10 am-6 pm.
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.
