iWorld
Amazon Prime Video Announces a New Prime Original Series – Four More Shots Please!
MUMBAI: Amazon Prime Video today announced their upcoming Prime Original series titled Four More Shots Please!, adding another Indian Original production to its existing slate. The show takes a close look at the lives of four young, urban Indian women and gives a voice to a new generation who live and love on their own terms. In its first season, this 10-part comedy, drama and romance series is anchored in the unceasing friendship between our four women and revolves around their relationships, work-life conflicts, ambitions and anxieties as they live, love and deal with being women in the India of 2018. Created in collaboration with Rangita Pritish Nandy, produced by Pritish Nandy Communications and directed by Anu Menon, the show is helmed by a predominantly women cast and crew. The series of course, casts zero judgment or moral lessons and has no man swooping in to save our women at end of the day—this is genuinely an equal worlds show! The Prime Original series will be available exclusively for Prime members on 25 January 2019 across more than 200 countries and territories.
Vijay Subramaniam, Director and Head, Content, Amazon Prime Video, India said, “We are thrilled to present Four More Shots Please!, a female-centric story of four urban Indian women, their life choices, their crises, romance, high points, helmed by their rock-solid, life-saving friendship. We have worked with a strong, female-led task force – right from the cast to the crew. Four More Shots Please! reflects the voices of the generation of Indian women who are independent in mind, body and thought. It’s a story that hasn’t been told yet in India and we’re glad to have the perfect partners in Pritish Nandy Communications bringing this series to fruition. Rangita Pritish Nandy’s vision and Anu Menon’s direction has truly transformed the story into a must watch series that is very entertaining and relatable to all our customers.”
Pritish Nandy, Chairman, Pritish Nandy Communications said, “Four More Shots Please! is our tribute to our times. It’s about a generation of young women, brave and vulnerable, independent and spirited, growing up in South Bombay and speaking the language of our times, living the life they yearn to live with courage, conviction and confidence. Four friends who share in each other’s joys and griefs, successes and occasional losses with love, fortitude and delight. It’s a funny, exciting, magical show full of wit, humour and insight into a generation that refuses to take itself for granted. Rangita, creator of the show and Anu, director for the first season, take you on a roller coaster ride through the lives, loves and ambitions of these four women who choose to take the road less travelled by. And yes, there are some great guys too on the show. They will take your breath away for they are today’s New Age men. So no, it’s not just a show about women. It’s all about us and our wonderful times. It’s about liberation from the past.”
Written by Devika Bhagat, with dialogues by Ishita Moitra, Four More Shots Please! revolves around the lives of four very different women each fighting their own individual battles and tackling life as it comes. Based in the southern tip of Mumbai, the city that never sleeps, these four friends get together every couple of days to binge talk and get smash drunk at their favorite garage bar, ‘Truck’. It’s the magic of pure, unadulterated and yet sometimes flawed, friendship. Four More Shots Please! is the urban, millennial Indian woman's gaze, a slice-of-life, brutally realistic portrait of what it is like to be in a country caught in a constant battle between the traditional and modern, to be a thinking woman, to be free in a country caught up in chains and to be honest in a country that thrives on hypocrisy.
The Prime Original stars Sayani Gupta, Kirti Kulhari, Bani J and Maanvi Gagroo as these four women along with a stellar ensemble cast comprising of Prateik Babbar, Neil Bhooplalam, Lisa Ray, Milind Soman, Amrita Puri and Sapna Pabbi. Replete with pop cultural references, Four More Shots Please! is the one thing you need to watch to get into the mind of the modern Indian woman. The show will be available on Prime Video on 25th January 2019.
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.
