iWorld
Airtel partners Ditto TV; launches new super app
MUMBAI: Competition makes for strange bedfellows. Airtel is partnering with the OTT platform of Zee Digital Convergence Limited’ dittoTV app as it seeks to battle the onslaught of Reliance Jio. Airtel has relaunched its MyAirtel App as a super app housing many other apps amongst which figures DittoTV. The telco said that Ditto TV with over 100 live TV channels and popular TV shows will be available without any subscription charges to its customers.
Other apps which feature in the new MyAirtel app include Hike Messenger, Wynk Music, Wynk Movies, Wynk Games, Airtel Money, Airtel Dialer and Juggernaut. All of them are apparently being made available free to subscribers.
The MyAirtel app also features Airtel Cloud and Airtel Dialer. Airtel Cloud provides 2GB of free cloud storage and back-up. The company said that there are no data upload charges for the scheduled overnight backups for prepaid customers currently, and this benefit will be made available to postpaid customers soon.
Airtel Dialer, on the other hand, offers 50 minutes of free Airtel-to-Airtel calling benefits, in addition to its call management feature.
With the launch of its new app suite, it’s quite clear that it’s going to be a corporate war in the mobile 4G space. First, Airtel, and Vodafone, Idea blocked calls from free call provider Reliance Jio until they were forced to open up to its services. Hence, the other players including Idea and Airtel are gearing up to attack Jio in the app space too. Idea too is currently putting together an app suite which will be unveiled by Q4-2017 and Q1-2018.
Said Bharati Airtel global CIO & director Harmeen Mehta: “As part of our Digital Airtel initiative, we are excited to bring you the new avatar of the MyAirtel App, which now offers a unified interface to the entire suite of our popular mobile apps and several new ones. All these apps have been curated to ensure customers are offered the best of the web, with more exciting apps and partnerships coming in the near future.
Customers who already have MyAirtel App on their smartphone can update to receive the new features, while new users can download the new MyAirtel App from Google Playstore and iOS App Store. The telco said that normal plan or pack data charges will apply on all the mobile applications on MyAirtel app.
Airtel is also working overnight to put together interesting data plans for potential customer. A couple of weeks earlier, the super telco had launched a special 4G data plan which offered data free for 90 days. Now, it is offering 15 GB of 3G–4G data at the price of 1 GB. The offer is valid for its pre-paid customers using Samsung J series of smart phones. Among the models which can opt for this offer include: Samsung J2 (2015 and 2016 models), Samsung J7 (2015 and 2016 models), Samsung J5 (2015 and 2016 models), Samsung J Max and Samsung J2 Pro.
The 3G–4G data is available to customers in 4G circles only. In non-4G circles, viewers can enjoy 1 GB of data any time of the day, but 4 GB can only be utilized between midnight and 6 AM.
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.
