iWorld
ALT Balaji to go live on 21 Feb, commercial launch on 15 April
MUMBAI: For Ekta Kapoor, Sameer Nair, and the entire team at Balaji Telefilms D-Day has finally dawned. 21 Februrary 2017 is the day when its latest diversification ALT Balaji which has been talked about for so long will finally launch.
Speaking to ET Now, CEO Sameer Nair said that the video on demand (VOD) platform will be rolled out to consumers as a free service to sample and snack in the first phase.
“It’s going tech live on 21 February,” he said. “We are testing the technology for the first month. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. We will be testing whether it plays out well. You put it off, you put it on. Does it work well? Are all the features performing as well as expected?”
He added that post this testing phase, the commercial launch has currently been slated for 15 April .
Pricing he revealed has been kept super disruptive. “Netflix has a tag of Rs 600 a month, ours will be at Rs 60,” he explained.
Nair pointed out that ALT Balaji is aiming for the 25 million cable and satellite audiences (of the total of 165 million Indian C&S homes) which are lapsing from Naagin kind of content.
“There is this giant world which between Narcos (on Netflix) and Naagin which is what we are going after,” he said. “The premium subscription homes. These 25 million folks are spending between Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,000 a month for telephony, television and entertainment. They will be spending Rs 600 more a month more in the next five years. That’s a $3 billion market. “
According to Nair, Bollywood has been pushing the envelope with its eye on this audience. “It produces a Sultan and a Dangal and it also makes a Pink, Kapoor & Sons and also makes Neerja. Television has not done that, and it remains currently in the giant mass base. And therein lies the opportunity.”
At commercial launch, ALT will showcase about 60-80 hours of content; the target is to finally have 300 hours for users to binge on. He revealed that Balaji Telefims will be making 30 per cent of those shows for ALT Balaji while the remainder have been farmed out to outside producers. Each series will be between 12-15 episodes, with each episode being between 12-15 -18 to 22 minutes long.
“Users will get to watch the first two to five episodes free,” he highlighted. “And if you like what you have seen, you will have to pay us a little bit of money. That is Rs 60 a month.”
Nair also revealed that the ALT business model has three years of losses written in to build its audience base and turn in profits.
“Our focus is on the digital platform because it is going to build a genuine B2C business for us. It will be a consistent business. Our costs are consistent for content whether we have a million subscribers or 10 million on ALT. So it can be from Rs 400 crore to RS 4,000 crore depending on how we scale up. Films show a wobble. TV is our core business and it continues. However, it is getting commoditised and we will continue to produce TV shows whether for DD or private satellite channels. But digital has the potential to be a game changer. It is our big play.”
Nair also took an indirect dig at the oodles of money that is being used to create content by those rushing into the video on demand segment. “There’s a lot of noise about the big players, the broadcasters. And all the money that is going to be spent,” he explained. “ But we all know that the amount of money spent is not equal to how good a story is. You can spend a billion dollars to make something; you can spend a billion dollars to make a turkey. We at Balaji are really focused on the story telling. And that’s where our advantage lies.”
Also Read :
Alt Balaji ropes in Manav Sethi as CMO
Ekta ties up with Lemon Advisors for Alt Balaji global launch
Balaji to invest Rs 200 cr in ALT, launch in Jan ’17
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.
