iWorld
Jio and organised retail add to RIL’s growth in second quarter
BENGALURU: Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani’s largest startup in the world in the form of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd or Jio has only gone from strength to strength since its inception. The mobile and broadband subsidiary of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), which is already the largest mobile data carrier in the world with more than 25 crore subscribers, reported EBITDA growth of nearly 2.5 times for the quarter ended 30 September 2018 (Q2 2019, quarter under review) as compared to the corresponding year ago quarter. Jio’s operating revenue for Q2 2019 grew by a healthy 50.3 percent year-on- year (y-o-y).
Some of the highlights of Jio’s performance in Q2 2019 include:
Standalone revenue from operations for Q2 2019 was Rs 9,240 crore with a 13.9 per cent q-o-q growth as compared to Rs 8,109 crore in the previous quarter Q1 2019.
Jio’s standalone EBITDA of Rs 3,573 crore for Q2 209 was 13.5 per cent higher q-o-q with EBITDA margin of 38.7 per cent as compared to Rs 3,147 crore and an EBITDA margin of 38.8 per cent in Q1 2019.
Jio’s standalone Net Profit was Rs 681 crore.
The company says that it closed Q2 2019 with a subscriber base of 25.23 crore. Jio says in a press release that it had the lowest churn in the industry at 0.66 per cent per month. ARPU during the quarter was Rs 131.7 per subscriber per month.
RIL’s organised retail arm’s revenue for Q2 FY19 grew by 121.5 per cent y-o-y to Rs 32,436 crore from Rs 14,646 crore. The segment’s EBIT rose by an unprecedented 272.5 per cent y-o-y to Rs 1,244 crore from Rs 334 crore.
RIL chairman Amabani said in a press release, “Jio was conceived with a mission to connect everyone and everything, everywhere – always at the highest quality and the most affordable price. We, at Jio, are glad with our progress towards our mission with more than 250 million subscribers on our network within 25 months of commencement of services. We have enabled our customers to adopt the digital life, with record consumption of data and use of digital services. Our next generation FTTH and enterprise services are now being made available to our customers to further enhance our value proposition to our customers.”
“We are making rapid progress on the growth of our digital platforms, across new commerce, media and entertainment, agriculture, education, healthcare and financial services, which will further enhance the quality of life and productivity of the people of India, ” added Ambani.
In an RIL earnings release, Ambani said, “Our commitment to create consumer value is gathering momentum, with the robust scale-up of India- centric consumer facing businesses. The financial performance of both Retail and Jio reflect the benefits of scale, technology and operational efficiencies. Retail business EBITDA has grown three fold on y-o-y basis whereas Reliance Jio EBITDA has grown nearly 2.5 times. Jio has now crossed 250 million subscriber milestone and continues to be the largest mobile data carrier in the world.”
RIL achieved revenue of Rs 156,291 crore ($ 21.6 billion), an increase of 54.5 per cent as compared to Rs 101,169 crore in the corresponding period of the previous year. RILs’ Profit after tax (PAT) was higher by 17.4 per cent at Rs 9,516 crore ($ 1.3 billion) as against Rs 8,109 crore in the corresponding period of the previous year. Operating profit before other income and depreciation increased by 35.6 per cent to Rs 21,108 crore ($ 2.9 billion) from Rs 15,565 crore in the corresponding period of the previous year.
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.
