iWorld
Airtel TV gamifies in-app experience for users with ‘Airtel TV FREE Hit’
MUMBAI: Airtel TV, the popular LIVE TV & Video streaming app from Airtel, today rolled out a highly interactive gamification experience for its users with ‘Airtel TV Free Hit’, an in-app quiz based game where users have to answer a set of interesting questions related to the ongoing T20 action. What’s more, there are daily cash prizes to be won from a total kitty of over two crore rupees.
The Airtel TV FREE Hit gaming experience is available to users in two version – Airtel TV Free Hit LIVE that can be played every day before the T20 match at 7:30pm and a non-LIVE version that can be played along the with the T20 match telecast.
Bharti Airte, CEO – Content and Apps, Sameer Batra: “The idea behind these contests is to gamify the whole cricketing experience for our users while making it highly engaging. With this new, intuitive platform, we are offering everyone the chance to be a winner during this ongoing T-20 extravaganza. We invite our users to participate in this exciting contest and make their experience more rewarding.”
To get started, users need to upgrade to the latest version of Airtel TV app on their smartphones and register themselves. Airtel TV FREE Hit is available to Android users right now.
Airtel TV FREE Hit LIVE is a first of its kind, simple skill based in-app game that is played LIVE with a digital anchor. To play the game, users should log into the Airtel TV app at 7:30 pm sharp daily, prior to the match. The digital anchor will bounce off 11 interesting question about the ongoing T20 matches. Users who get all 11 questions correct will share the winning amount.
This game will also offer users the option of ‘life’ which is active during the course of T20 matches and will help users evade elimination. Users are also granted extended ‘lives’ upon watching an existing game till the end and can be utilized for the next/ upcoming match as well.
Airtel TV FREE hit: This non-LIVE version gets activated at the beginning of every T20 match and has been designed specifically for the sit-at-home cricket lovers. Users simply have to correctly analyse the match outcome to win instant money. Users will be awarded runs for each correct answer and the ones reaching the targets (set at the beginning of the game) and will share the winning amount at the end of the match, daily.
Winners of both the contests will be notified via in-app notification. The quiz will run for the duration of the ongoing T20 series.
Airtel TV app was the most downloaded* video OTT app in India during January and February 2018. All content on Airtel TV app is FREE for Airtel Postpaid and Prepaid customers till June 2018. With the addition of exciting LIVE IPL action, Airtel TV app is the go to destination for end-to-end entertainment from LIVE TV to Movies, Shows, Original Series and more.
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.
