iWorld
OrangeGlobal Stories powers up leadership for Eshtory launch
MUMBAI: OrangeGlobal Stories has hit the refresh button on its leadership team with high-octane appointments to key positions. From finance to production, the new power-packed team is gearing up to take the platform’s flagship offering, ‘Eshtory’, to groundbreaking heights.
Let’s face it—stories never sounded this exciting!
Think of them as the Avengers, but for storytelling. Here’s who’s who in this star-studded lineup:
. Chief financial officer Amar Vanzara: With 19 years of experience across financial heavyweights like Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, Amar knows numbers like a chef knows recipes. His mission? Ensuring Eshtory cooks up sustainable growth and a Michelin-star-worthy financial strategy.
. Chief technology officer Aditya Kale: A certified tech wizard with expertise in IoT ecosystems and predictive analytics, Aditya is here to make Eshtory a seamless tech delight. Think binge-worthy stories, without the buffering drama.
. Head of human resources Tina Chakrabarti: Armed with 24 years of experience and a Six Sigma certification, Tina plans to turn Eshtory into a talent magnet. Will her HR magic make every employee’s Monday feel like Friday? Only time will tell.
. Head of marketing Preetam Thingalaya: With two decades of brand wizardry for giants like Zee5, Preetam’s ready to make Eshtory a household name. Brace yourselves for some seriously buzz-worthy campaigns.
. Head of production Pranay Naigaonkar: A media maverick with 20 years of experience, Pranay will ensure Eshtory’s content hits all the right notes. Literally.
‘Eshtory’ isn’t just another audio platform; it’s a new wave that’s riding high. As OrangeGlobal Stories co-founder Harrish Bhatia puts it, “We are thrilled to welcome such an accomplished group of leaders to the Eshtory team. Their diverse expertise and visionary leadership will play a critical role in bringing our groundbreaking audio storytelling platform to life.”
Can they truly redefine how stories are told?
The platform’s name might hint at history, but it’s all about the future. Built on a foundation of creativity and cutting-edge technology, Eshtory promises to deliver immersive stories that will make you laugh, cry, and question your definition of entertainment.
Radio Orange CEO & OrangeGlobal Stories deputy chairperson, Inu Majumdar sums it up beautifully, “The strength of any transformative endeavour lies in its people. This remarkable team brings unparalleled depth of talent and expertise, empowering Eshtory to set new benchmarks in storytelling and deliver experiences that captivate and inspire.”
Echoing her sentiment, OrangeGlobal Stories co-founder Viplove Gupte remarked, “At Eshtory, we aim to redefine how stories are experienced. With this stellar leadership team, we are confident in delivering narratives that blend creativity and technology to deeply resonate with audiences.”
OrangeGlobal Stories co-founder Nilesh Kadam added, “Eshtory is built on the foundation of innovation and engagement. These appointments strengthen our vision of transforming the audio storytelling landscape, offering unique experiences that push creative boundaries.”
With a dream team in place, ‘Eshtory’ is on track to disrupt the audio storytelling space. Its promise? Stories that don’t just entertain but immerse, engage, and inspire. From finance to production, every aspect is primed to set a new industry standard.
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.
