iWorld
Hotstar to stream Emmy Awards in India on 18 Sept
MUMBAI: It is bringing the world to India and taking India to the globe!
Ahead of its launch in a “few international markets in the next couple of months” Hotstar, ranked number one by App Annie in terms of MAUs, is also bringing the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards to Indian viewers. live. This is even as the research firm KalaGato reported 73 per cent jump in Hotstar’s market share, that is expected to spurt with the addition of Emmys, CBS, and GoT.
For Hotstar, which has over 100,000 hours of drama and movies in nine languages, and covers every major global sporting event, the Emmy countdown has now begun. As the excitement builds up, viewers of the India’s leading video-on-demand service will be able to tune in to the awards simulcast on 18 September, at 530 am on 18 September 2017 from 8 pm onwards. Thereafter, the ceremony will be available in the Hotstar library from Tuesday, 19 September.
Indiantelevision.com spoke to the Hotstar CEO Ajit Mohan on Friday evening, but he sought queries on email, which have been sent.
With a whopping 149 nominations across 23 shows that it has licensed from American studios, Hotstar is the home of the Emmys and will be the only digital platform in the country to telecast simulcast the event. Viewers will have the opportunity to watch the much-anticipated ceremony along with the rest of the world, from wherever they are. This year, the event will be hosted by Stephen Colbert, previous Emmy Award winner and host of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
From the Hotstar library, acclaimed shows like Westworld, Feud, Veep and Big Little Lies lead the extensive list with the most number of nominations. Other favourites include Night Of, This is Us, Silicon Valley, The Wizard of Lies, among others. Through their partnership with the world’s largest studios, like HBO, Disney and Showtime, Hotstar has managed to bring the most celebrated international shows to India, under the Hotstar Premium bucket.
(For our readers: We, at indiantelevision.com got an email from Hotstar communications agency Text100 on 16 September at 11:19 pm after the Emmy Award Hotstar telecast press release was published on 16 September at 9:22 am. It had already been indexed by the Google News bot. The Text 100 email read as follows
“Request you to disregard the announcement in this email. The information contained in it is incorrect. Hence, please do not publish it or use it in any form of story. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
Another email followed from Text100 at 11:49 pm. It said:
“As discussed, request you to disregard the previous communication on Hotstar live streaming the Emmys. The information is incorrect. Hence, please do not use it in any form of story. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
Here’s the link that was published – http://www.indiantelevision.com/iworld/over-the-top-services/hotstar-to-live-stream-emmy-awards-in-india-on-18-sept-170916?amp
We have chosen to use the strikethrough text mode to inform readers that the story has been cancelled. Apologies for any inconvenience caused by the incorrect information provided by Hotstar’s agency, Text100. We adhere to the highest editorial standards and our effort is to bring you the most accurate information possible. Always – Editor
(Updated on 17 September 2017 at 10:57 am)
Later in the day we got another email from Text100 stating that the Emmy Awards would be streamed on 18 September from 8 pm onwards. So now you know when to watch your favourite awards show on Hotstar. Hence, we removed the strikethrough mode and updated the story.
(Updated on 17 September at 6:43 pm)
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.
