iWorld
‘Regional VOD, cashless subs among 2017 trends’
MUMBAI: The video on demand streaming industry in India is only blooming, with a host of developments in this year. The digital eco-system has seen production houses like Balaji Telefilms, Indian broadcasting networks such as Star India, Sony Pictures Networks, Viacom18, Zee, etc and few international players like Netflix, Hooq, Amazon Prime, Spuul, etc entering this space which caters to the varied tastes of a very heterogeneous Indian audience. The demand for customized viewing of digital content in India is only increasing. Various factors such as smartphone penetration, launch of 4G, data cost coming down, better infrastructure, diverse library of content offerings not only in Hindi and English but also in several regional languages, etc are the key factors that have driven the rise of video content this year.
In the year 2017, according to the Akamai & NASSCOM report on the future of internet in India, the mobile video content to grow at an 83 per cent CAGR in next 5 years. OTT has not only arrived, it is here to stay, and the advent of 4G and improved bandwidth speeds have only re-enforced this. With increased competition between the video on demand apps, regional content that appeals to particular states will be the key to capture user share.
Online video subscription numbers fluctuate dramatically every month. The number of unique online video viewers will grow from 66 million in 2015 to 355 million in 2020. E-payments and mobile wallets are getting more popular among the millennials in the country. Digitization of cash will accelerate over the next few years.
Spuul India’s Rajiv Vaidya opined:
Cord Cutting
Today’s viewers have a choice of a host of viewing platforms to choose from, including digital television, internet, tablets and smartphones. Revolutionary app-powered devices like Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast and other streaming devices lets viewers watch their favourite shows across a variety of screens. According to the Akamai & NASSCOM report on the future of internet in India, the mobile video content to grow at an 83 per cent CAGR in five years. Every major television manufacturer now offers “smart” television sets, with integrated internet features that provide access to a host of on-demand streaming media directly. OTT has not only arrived, it is here to stay, and the advent of 4G and improved bandwidth speeds have only re-enforced this. This surging popularity of OTT platforms has challenged the exclusivity that linear television enjoyed till quite recently. Broadcasters have begun witnessing the market trend of “cord cutting”, with a sizeable segment of viewers tuning out from cable subscription and completely switching over to OTT platforms. In fact the millennials have grown up watching shows online, and will possibly never subscribe to paid television services due to multiple streaming options now available and multiple generations that are accustomed to on-demand services. Looking at trends in the US, 2010 was the first year that regular pay television saw a quarterly decline in subscription numbers (this was reported by WSJ, back in 2012). We’re still a while away from that but a small pocket of users in India (usually in the larger cities) are exploring their options when it comes to cord cutting.
Let’s go regional
With increased competition between the video on demand apps, regional content that appeals to particular states will be the key to capture user share. According to the Akamai & NASSCOM report on the future of internet in India, about 75% of the new internet users consume content in local language. The real trick in winning the market is to capture the Tier III towns and the rural areas. According to the Frost & Sullivan report a large percentage of video-on-demand viewership in India is fragmented across states and languages. We have seen a lot of growth in regional content on the video on demand apps, fuelled by demand from both local viewers and the international diaspora. According to Internet and Mobile Association in India (IMAI), the Internet user base will cross 500 million by 2018, with rural Internet users alone being almost 210 million.
Micro transactions and cashless transactions
According to the Frost & Sullivan report there are 66 million unique connected video viewers in India, of which 1.3 million are paid video subscribers. Online video subscription numbers fluctuate dramatically every month. The number of unique online video viewers will grow from 66 million in 2015 to 355 million in 2020. The country is heading for a cashless economy with a colossal change in the way netizens make their day to day transactions. E-payments and mobile wallets are getting more popular among the millennials in the country. Digitization of cash will accelerate over the next few years. Non-cash payment transactions, which today constitute 22 per cent of all consumer payments, will overtake cash transactions by 2023. Digital payments instruments will drive the growth in non-cash payments, according to Google BCG Report. Micro-transactions will form a substantial portion of the industry, with over 50 per cent of person-to-merchant transactions expected to be under INR 100 the study said. The report predicts that the value of remittances and money transfer that will pass through alternate digital payment instruments will double to 30 per cent by 2020.
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.
