iWorld
Netflix, Amazon may contribute to rising production cost in India
MUMBAI: Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are known for loosening their purse strings when it comes to production cost. The threat of driving up costs is already looming over the Hollywood industry. As the OTT giants have begun to mark their territory in India, there is a concern that production cost may rise here as well.
Recent reports state that Netflix and Amazon are throwing money to lure top talent from Hollywood. In addition to that, Netflix is also driving up Hollywood salaries by offering big pay rises. Traditional players have been sweating it out in competing with the rising cost. Netflix’s $300 million deal to poach Ryan Murphy from 21st Century Fox was a classic example of this development. Robert Kirkman, the creator of the hit show The Walking Dead, signed a two-year deal with Amazon last August.
Both companies have renewed their focus on India and, in order to understand the market, it is likely that they will look to poach talent from rival companies. The quest to offer premium content will also lead to higher production cost.
When Eros Digital COO Ali Hussein was asked if because of Netflix and Amazon’s higher investment the overall cost of Indian ecosystem will go up or not, he said though there’s not a definitive answer to this. But, in general, the cost will definitely go up. Along with that, he also feels that it depends on how smartly the work is being done in the existing ecosystem to have a certain amount of control over the cost.
“If in any business, the demand is high, the supply chain cost will go up. Across all businesses, when there is a large demand for episodic or original web content, how do you ensure you are able to maintain a certain quality of production with a growing talent pool? It’s not just the cost of the celebrities or directors, it is the technical cost and that of the entire process,” says Hussein.
ALTBalaji CMO Manav Sethi thinks the cost has already increased due to international players splurging but the output quality has not increased much. In addition to that, the companies have less understanding of the Indian market, which has unorganised, segmented content making.
According to Bodhi Tree Multimedia founder Mautik Tolia, the increasing number of productions from Netflix and Amazon will not have any short-term impact on overall production costs. This is because the volume of content being produced at the moment by the duo is very limited compared to overall content production in India. It will only drive the premium talent costs upwards such as A-list actors and directors. But at the same time platforms are providing opportunities for new and fresh talent, making the content creation process more inclusive and might actually bring down the talent costs as a fresh pool of talent will get injected in the system. “It all depends on what path the platforms will take forward whether they emulate the traditional studio systems going for safer bets with established stars and directors or punting in and promoting new talent. This remains to be seen,” Tolia says on the possible future scenario.
However, one of the main reasons for spending more money on production is to increase premium quality content. “Overall, I believe that content quality in digital both for domestic as well as international players is improving and there will be a premium for quality content,” Arre co-founder Ajay Chacko says.
Endemol Shine CEO Abhishek Rege also thinks Netflix is only shelling out money to get premium content. “Costs in digital will be higher than that of what we see in television because digital needs better quality of content,” he says.
Where there’s a fear that Netflix and Amazon may shake up the Indian ecosystem like they are doing in Hollywood, the scenario is less viable in India despite the fact that production cost will definitely go up. Indeed, the streaming giants will aggressively try to acquire top talent from the industry but other OTT players can opt for fresh talent. In the next four to five years, the traditional players, including Bollywood and broadcasters, will face a tough challenge from these international players. However, with new content strategies, the cost can be controlled to a certain level.
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.
