iWorld
Bengali OTT players prioritise market growth over competition
MUMBAI: Demand for regional content has received a boost like never before thanks to the smartphone and internet explosion in tier II and III cities. Not only are international and national over-the-top (OTT) players delving into regional content, but also local players.
One such upcoming regional OTT market is the Bengali one. Though Hoichoi is climbing the ranks to the top, Addatimes is also chasing not far behind. For now, the two players believe in healthy co-existence rather than competition.
Addatimes and Hoichoi, both were launched in the same year, i.e. 2017. For obvious reasons, Hoichoi could come up with more content and better market strategy because of its parent company SVF’s huge capital. Now, Surinder Films, another leading production house in Bengali industry has started investing in Addatimes for a 33 per cent stake which could give a major boost to the platform.
Addatimes managing director and founder Rajiv Mehra had a 14 years stint in the Bengali television industry. Speaking to Indiantelevision.com, Mehra said that he felt there was no creativity left in daily soaps and channels had the ultimate power in hand. Then came the inflection point when he decided to start a digital venture. Despite knowing the fact that it would take a long time to break even, he trusted the digital medium.
All content was free for the first five months and then a subscription model was added at Rs 100 for three months and Rs 300 for a year. The Addatimes spokesperson claims to have 30,000 subscribers currently and 39 lakh unique viewers.
Since its launch, it has emphasised on original content but there are some movies also. From mid-August the films produced by Surinder Films will be available on Addatimes. Till July, the platform will see the launch of one web series and one movie a month and from August onwards, there will be two of each.
Mehra expects the business to break even in 2021. Due to limited funds, it is strategically avoiding cash-burning mode so that the platform can sustain in the market for the next three to four years.
Hoichoi isn’t too concerned about competition in the market. “We don’t think about competition because it’s not critically important today. It’s about getting more and more people in online ecosystem to grow. Having more players is better because that helps to grow the ecosystem, grows awareness and creates a habit among consumers,” said Hoichoi co-founder Vishnu Mohta. He also sees opportunity in the market for more players dedicated to Bengali content. Other than West Bengal, Bangladesh is also a potential market for both the platforms.
Mehra also reflected the same tone. “It’s not about what we have, they don’t have. Everyone is going forward with their own strategies for the business. But since they (Hoichoi) have more capital, they might reach the desired target one year before us. Eventually, we will also reach the target,” he commented on the competition with Hoichoi.
These apart, deep-pocketed players at the national and international level will also be able to get into people’s phones faster than the regional ones. If the regional players fail to make a mark soon, they will face difficulty in grabbing a larger market share.
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.
