iWorld
OTT’s first digital talent hunt for kids launched on Voot
MUMBAI: HDFC Life, a private life insurance company, has announced the return of HDFC Life Young Stars Season 2 in partnership with Voot, a Video-on-Demand platform from Viacom18.
Conceptualised by Maxus for HDFC Life, this unique digital talent show for kids includes performances by children, between the ages of 6 and 14, in the popular categories of Dancing, Singing, Acting and Musical Instruments. The engaging show HDFC Life YoungStars Season 2, showcasing kids and their inspiring talent, is now streaming exclusively on Voot .
Along with mesmerizing audiences with their stellar performances, the young prodigies will also be mentored and judged by celebrity experts from the respective fields. The celebrity judges this season include:
– Salman Yusuff Khan, a popular dancer turned actor of ABCD fame, will be making his judging debut and mentoring the young dancers
– Jay Bhanushali, an award winning television actor and renowned host, will be mentoring the child actors
– Harshdeep Kaur, the Bollywood singing sensation, will be mentoring young singers, while
– Leslie Lewis of Colonial Cousins fame will be mentoring the budding musicians.
YoungStars Season 2 aligns to HDFC Life’s digital first focus and Voot’s vision of curating innovative content experiences. Parents uploaded their child’s video clips on the Young Stars microsite, which were then shortlisted. The selected children will get mentored by the celebrity judges, who will nurture their talent in the field of their choice. The finale will include a faceoff between the finalists and the winners, who will be adjudged ‘HDFC Life Young Stars’ and will get the opportunity to perform with the celebrity mentors.
Commenting on YoungStars Season 2, Pankaj Gupta, EVP-Strategic Alliances, Bancassurance & Marketing, HDFC Life said, “Every child has a special talent that blooms through recognition and constant encouragement. Keeping this in mind, we launched HDFC Life YoungStars, an innovative digital platform that gives parents the opportunity to nurture their child’s talent, through expert guidance. The platform allows us, as a brand, to give parents the ability to secure more than just their child’s financial future.”
Pooja Verma, Head – Content, Sports and Entertainment Partnerships at Maxus, said, “Maxus is incredibly proud to have established HDFC Life YoungStars as a valuable asset for HDFC Life to bring alive the brand’s proposition of ‘Sar utha ke jiyo!’. The show extensively engaged with parents and kids, in line with the deeply rooted brand philosophy.”
She further added, “We are excited to reprise the success of HDFC Life YoungStars at an even bigger scale this year, together with the perfect partner that we found in Voot. The encouraging response so far has once again, affirmed our expertise and belief in the power of using content for brands to tell their stories in newer and compelling ways.”
Monika Shergill, Head of Content, Viacom 18 Digital Ventures said “We at Voot are always looking at bringing content innovation to our viewers. With HDFC Life YoungStars 2, we have brought alive an immersive platform for kids to showcase their talent. With this show, we are confident of providing entertainment & engagement for all our viewers – both parents and kids.”
She further added “We are happy to partner with HDFC Life and Maxus to promote new and unique talent amongst kids. Both HDFC Life and Voot have a shared vision of empowering kids and with this initiative we intend to tap into their early potential and give them a platform to show case the same to the world.”
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.
