iWorld
Indian filmmaker among 6 selected for Hooq
MUMBAI: Hooq Filmmakers Guild has turned six filmmakers’ ideas into reality. Hooq has announced six titles for pilot development from its inaugural Hooq Filmmakers Guild 2017. The Guild, launched in June 2017, is an annual initiative designed to seek out film talents in Asia that have great ideas but lack the opportunity to turn these ideas into reality. It claims to be one of the top VOD service in Southeast Asia.
The 2017 selections are Bhak (India), Suay (Thailand), Haunt Me (Singapore), How To Be A Good Girl (Singapore), Aliansi (Indonesia) and Heaven and Hell (Indonesia). The six were selected from 500 submissions received by Hooq over a 2-month period from all over the region.
The top ideas will get $30,000 to produce a pilot episode for the platform. Hooq subscribers and judges will vote for their best choice which will be converted into a full series.
Hooq CEO Peter Bithos said, “Hooq has always been a big supporter of the Asian film industry. The Hooq Filmmakers Guild was designed with this aim in mind and focuses on developing the next generation of Asian film talents by providing them with the opportunity to showcase their ideas and develop their skills through connecting with the Guild’s judges who are the crème de la crème of the Asian film business.” He further added, “We are so excited to announce the six pilots that we have selected to be produced. There were so many great ideas to select from so we decided to produce six pilots instead of the five that we had intended. We look forward to the completed pilots and hope that everyone will get Hooq’d on them.
Judge Puttipong Promsaka Na Sakolnakorn commented, “The number of submissions was far more than what any of us were expecting”. The submissions spanned a range of genres and styles, from science fiction to supernatural and even historical dramas. The dominant genres submitted were drama, horror/supernatural and comedy, with science fiction and fantasy a close fourth.
“I was deeply amazed by the quality of the submissions, so much so that it made judging really difficult!” said judge Mouly Surya, director of ‘Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts’. “It was affirmation to me that Asia truly has immense talent when it comes to filmmaking.”
This sentiment was echoed by her fellow Indonesian judge, actor Nicholas Saputra. She said, “Not only were their submissions for the Hooq Filmmakers Guild fantastic, they are so energetic, creative and bursting with ideas and serves as a reminder to all seasoned filmmakers to never lose that spark inside of us.”
Judging was based on the relevance and potential appeal to Asian audiences, demonstrable creativity in storytelling and most of all, a well told Asian story with an original point of view.
India’s winning entry, ‘Bhak,’ is a colourful dramedy that follows the adventures of two ambitious young filmmakers in the Bollywood film industry. Written by Arjun Chatterjee and Shreyom Ghosh from Big3 Media, it explores themes of passion, betrayal and love.
‘Suay,’ a Thai crime thriller by Marcelo von Schwartz, follows the story of ladyboy go-go dancer Lola, who receives a cut-off ear belonging to her best friend and mentor, Carly. She is then forced to draw upon her past identity as a tough male private detective and descend into the underbelly of Bangkok.
Supernatural drama ‘Haunt Me,’ by Oman Dhas and Goh Ming Siu from Third Floor Pictures, follows the story of Kwong, a widower, who after his father’s death, moves into his family ancestral home and discovers his family’s secret sacred destiny; guiding lost souls to the other side.
The other Singaporean entry, ‘How To Be A Good Girl,’ comes from Abundant Productions and follows former socialite turned ex-convict, Frances Lee, who is looking to reclaim her life after time behind bars.
The Indonesian winning entries reflect two ends of the genre spectrum. ‘Aliansi’ is an offbeat comedy by Muttaqiena Imaamaa. It follows the story of a down-and-out Jakarta-based creative executive, who gets a chance to start over when a mysterious millionaire approaches him to create advertising campaigns – to convince the public that aliens are real.
By contrast, Bobby Prabowo & Eric Tiwa’s ‘Heaven and Hell,’ takes us into the world of the Eastern Indonesia mafia. When a gang war about to break out in Darmaga Batu, his adoptive hometown, Chris contemplates leaving the violent world of crime, until he realises, the only way he can protect his jailed father, is by becoming the head of the crime world.
Thai Hooq Filmmakers Guild judge Wasin Pokpong said, “I am very happy that Hooq launched the Hooq Filmmakers Guild this year because it has become a platform for aspiring filmmakers who were lacking resources to finally be able to bring their ideas to life. Sometimes, all it takes is a little boost to make dreams come true.”
Millions of viewers across the region are now keeping their eyes peeled as these six titles make the transition from a good idea to great stories.
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.
