iWorld
OTT players up the ante with niche content
MUMBAI: With the digital era progressing at a geometric rate, India’s media and entertainment industry has seen the proliferation of a number of over-the-top (OTT) players, including many international players. As a result, several niche genres of content are finding a place to grow. Viewers are coming to associate each platform with a type of personality represented through its content.
According to FICCI’s 2018 report, digital subscription in 2017 grew by 50 per cent, riding on the back of niche content. Global content, sports and, increasingly, OTT-only content are also other factors behind the whopping growth of rising viewership on digital.
India’s burgeoning OTT market already has more than 40 OTT players according to estimates. To draw viewers, each platform has to make a separate identity for itself. Subscription-based video on demand has, however, a long way to go as only three per cent of Indian households are paid subscribers of online video-streaming services. To attract more paying subscribers, the video platforms need to come up with content which users will think are worth paying.
Despite making inroads into several developed countries, Netflix is yet scraping the surface of the Indian arena. Its major international competitor, Amazon, has left it far behind here. However, Netflix has created its signature with its large number of original series such as The Crown, House of Cards, Bojack Horseman, Stranger Things etc. Moreover, other than the originals, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Rick and Morty, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Sherlock are streaming on Netflix attracting a large number of binge watchers. A report by Netflix stated that 88 per cent of its Indian viewers are binge watchers, the third highest in the world. The country finishes series in three days compared to the global average of four days.
But the country lacks in good local content. Though it has added some famous Hindi movies to its library, it does not have enough regional content to offer. Realising the demand, Netflix announced a new multilingual original series in partnership with Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment.
Compared to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video is doing good business in India. According to App Annie’s February report, Amazon Prime Video had 13.4 million active users but Netflix had 6 million active users. One of the main reasons for its success is that Amazon has a brilliant movie library for India’s Bollywood crazy fans. The e-commerce major has potential deals with five big long production houses-Yash Raj Films, Excel Entertainment, Dharma Productions, Vishesh Films, and T-Series. Data shows that Indians don’t mind consuming longer content on data connections. Viewers love to watch Hindi movies on the platform. Amazon realised early on that in multi-lingual India, you can’t make do with just Hindi and so delved into regional content as well.
Star India’s OTT arm Hotstar is sprinting here with its large content library. The live streaming of sports matches is one of its best features. For multi-lingual audience, it offers a wide range of catch-up content in several languages while urban folks can watch shows from HBO, Disney, Fox such as Game of Thrones and Westworld.
IPL streaming on Hotstar is one of the biggest boosts for it. This year, it will be telecast in six languages – Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Bengali.
Among other platforms, Voot has youth-centric TV shows including Big Boss, MTV Unplugged, Roadies, Splitsvilla. Gaurav Gandhi’s successor as Voot COO is likely to bring some change. Sony Liv also has exclusive rights of cricket matches from several countries.
Amidst a huge number of OTT platforms and a long list of contents, content discoverability is a major issue. In this context, almost every platform is unable to satisfy audience with proper suggestions despite having a large variety of contents. To enhance their recommendation engines, the platforms have to implement artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, a recent study showed that none of these are yet able to beat good old word of mouth.
OTT players have the work cut out for them here. From branding themselves to ensuring there’s something for everyone, the challenges lie spread out.
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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.
