iWorld
Indian market has scope for niche OTT platforms despite several challenges
MUMBAI: OTT platforms offering niche content is an emerging trend in the global market. Dedicated content offers brands an opportunity to differentiate themselves in an over-congested market. Currently in India, there’s one such example Veqta, an OTT platform offering sports content. While it is too early to predict such trends in the Indian ecosystem, such a concept definitely offers an opportunity in the market.
With the rise of streamers worldwide, content available on OTT is also evolving gradually. The primary challenge for OTT players is to provide viewers with compelling content, especially when it comes to the SVOD model. When a platform offers niche content, it overcomes the primary challenge of differentiating its position in market.
FishFlicks, an Australian brand, comes with recreational sporting content like fishing and hunting. Such content was picked knowing Australian people’s passion for fishing. Before launching, it was understood that fishing enthusiasts would be excited by the offering. Along with potential in national market, an interest in Australian fishing also fetches certain amount of global subscribers.
Like FishFlicks, there’s another platform called Cyberobics which is basically a virtual fitness world. Today, maintaining a healthy lifestyle is a challenge to people across world. Every now and then people browse how to be fit. In such a scenario, Cyberobics offers not just something unique in the entertainment segment but also relevant content of public interest.
“If you are getting a sizeable amount of aggregated audience for a particular niche and then is a potential possibility to look at if there’s a focused platform-specific strategy or brand-specific strategy for that particular niche,” Eros Digital COO Ali Hussein said.
It’s also easier for viewers to find content that interests them since they are already enthusiastic about the content catalogue offered. The bouquet of dedicated content ensures that users don’t give up browsing the platform too soon. Vishnu Mohta, the co-founder of Hoichoi, says that content discovery is less of a challenge on niche OTT platforms as the content is customised to cater to the user’s interests along with the app offering recommendation on what to watch.
A big advantage these platform have is that they evoke a sense of loyalty among users. Since the audience consuming the content is already passionate about the content topic, the affinity for the brand grows easily. Initially, if these platforms opt for the SVOD model, the audience is unlikely to mind paying for the content. However, these platforms have to go a long way to secure sponsorship or get advertisers on board.
While brand loyalty may be easy to acquire, raising awareness about the brand can be a daunting task. Vishnu Mohta says marketing and reaching out to people is always a challenge for these platforms. The advantage, he adds, is that marketing strategies can be focussed on target groups alone. However, with limited amount of subscription revenue, it’s not possible for these brands to bombard customers with great advertisement.
OTT platforms offering sports content will easily have a bigger market, Mohta says. In India, the OTT market has started picking up only in the last two years. It’s very early to predict if it could emerge as a trend. Spuul content head D Girish says, “There has not been enough data to conclude that there’s an upsurge of popularity of such content. Even on television niche content viewership is less than 7%, definitely less than 10%.” He adds that that there is enough scope for these platforms to grow, but it’s still too soon to predict if it will play a significant role.
Hussein and Mohta echo that it will take a few years for the Indian ecosystem to tap into the full potential of the platform. “I think there is an opportunity for niche content because digital video allows niche content to get consumed and discovered. But I think people have to be smart in terms of why they want an OTT strategy, why it is different compared to running a channel on YouTube or Facebook,” says Hussein. “Niche platforms have their USP also. People have a stronger loyalty to these platforms. Niche OTT have a play. I’m not sure about all genres will work or not. There are specific genres like spirituality, devotional can have a play,” he adds.
It will be a challenge for these platforms to survive against larger platforms. Eventually, they may even consider consolidation to ensure a longer innings. Alternatively, larger platforms may acquire the niche platforms if they offer interesting content to attract a wider audience. Perhaps the solution to evading shutting down may depend on the choice and quality of content.
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.
