iWorld
VOOT Kids licenses children’s content from Oxford University Press
MUMBAI: Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd’s digital arm Viacom18 Digital Ventures has gone live with India’s most inclusive kids’ entertainment and fun learning OTT application: VOOT Kids. Catering to the digitally native kids’ ecosystem, VOOT Kids is all set to redefine entertainment and pedagogy through a diverse and multi-genre content offering across Watch, Read, Listen and Learn segments. Further expanding the entertainment experience in the kids’ category, VOOT Kids, the all new fun edutainment platform, has engaged with iconic brands including Oxford University Press to fortify its rich content library by licensing 175 junior fiction and non-fiction titles. The 500+ e-books now available on VOOT Kids, including the titles from Oxford University Press, are all set to provide an immersive reading experience to children across the nation.
Offering the most pedagogically advanced learning and educational content, Oxford University Press is a globally well-known and trustworthy brand with a wide range of children’s books. With its vast and multi-varied genre of content, VOOT Kids’ content slate (READ section) will now include much-loved titles by Oxford University Press, including traditional tales and rewritten classics, such as The Jungle Book, The Three Musketeers and Gulliver's Travels.
Speaking about VOOT Kids and the content licensed from Oxford University Press, Saugato Bhowmik – Business Head, VOOT Kids, said, “Kids today are screenagers and have emerged as prolific users of content on digital. As digital natives, they are the first to adopt trends on digital. It was hence imperative to create a platform that offers holistic entertainment and learning experience that would improve quality and relevance of content consumption by kids on digital. VOOT Kids is just that – An inclusive app aimed at enriching Kids’ entertainment and learning experience on digital through immersive segments that encourage reading, story-telling, quizzes, etc.”
He further added “Kids love stories and the addition of junior fiction titles from Oxford on VOOT Kids are sure to add significant diversity and value to our vast content slate”
Commenting on the recently signed content licensing agreement with Viacom18 Media, Giuseppe Trapani, Senior Business Development Manager, Oxford University Press, said, “We are delighted to partner with VOOT Kids, and support its users’ learning through reading for pleasure. We commend VOOT Kids in its mission to bridge the gap between learning, knowledge and entertainment, and this collaboration with VOOT Kids will allow Oxford University Press to introduce even more readers to many of its most-loved books for children.”
With over 5000+ hours of content consisting of children’s all-time favourite Indian and International shows like Dora the Explorer, Oswald, Motu Patlu, Peppa Pig, Chhota Bheem, Ben10, Barbie Dreamtopia , diverse book titles , immersive audio books and fun learning games, VOOT Kids is all set to offer a dynamic and inclusive experience of fun, learning and entertainment.
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.
