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Nice terror attack, Cannes and the Palais des Festivals
The date: 14 July. The location: The Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai’s Colaba area. French consul general Yves Perrin plays host to businessmen, politicians, artistes, entertainment professionals, journalists like he does every year on Bastille Day to celebrate France’s National Day. Wine, champagne, and a mouth watering menu of French cuisine is rustled up by the Taj’s chefs and served to those who have a linkage with France. That’s of course after the customary playing of the French national anthem and the speech by the honorary counsel general. The evening proceeds well and late into the night as guests mingle and enjoy each other’s company.
Some 4,000-odd miles away in the picturesque city of Nice in the south of France, the entire Palais des Anglais is choc-a-bloc with general members of the public. The mood is celebratory. The bright summer sky, and the azure blue sea, are what the French Riviera town is known and has drawn tens of thousands of tourists during the holiday period.
The local Nice government has planned an evening of fireworks and music to celebrate France’s National Day. Tourists and locals have been looking forward to an evening of revelry and gaiety. The main street is cordoned off courtesy the roadblocks that have been erected. Young couples with their children in prams, some with their elderly parents, kids with their parents, groups of young are lounging about, walking around relaxed.
Suddenly, a white truck comes down the crowded road, swaying from side to side, driven at 40-50 miles per hour in a zig-zag motion and bodies start to fly. A scramble starts as word gets around further down the Promenade that a killer is on the loose. In the meanwhile, scores are hit by the white truck; some die on the spot; some are critically injured.
In a matter of a few more minutes, the police shoot and kill the driver of the truck. Before that, however, the manic truck has inflicted maximum damage. On the street lie mangled, broken, twisted bodies, bleeding.
Celebration has turned to shock. 84 people die, 10 children, and many more are hospitalized, critically injured.
The horror of that attack spreads across the world. A must-visit tourist destination, Nice has been relatively safe for years and is the gateway to Cannes, which houses the Palais des Festivals. A majority of the world’s biggest and most famous exhibitions and festivals are held in the building– the Lions, the Film Festival, Mipcom, MipTV, Midem, Toys, Mipim and many others. Nice airport is where everybody lands and takes a cab or a bus to Cannes.
About 300 film professionals from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh attend the Cannes Film Festival, another 100-odd ad & marketing executives the Cannes Lions, and about 400 attend the TV and music markets – Mipcom, Mip TV and Midem every year.
Cannes is where Indian broadcast, film, animation, production and music executives go to do business, buying and selling content, signing co-production and syndication deals. And have been doing so for many years.
Should they continue visiting it now? Is it safe enough?
Indeed, it is as safe as Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Hotel where France’s National Day celebrations were held on the same ill-fated evening. One can’t forget that a few years ago, the Taj Mahal Hotel itself was the target of a terrorist attack which left hundreds dead. Did we stop visiting the Taj Mahal Hotel?
Visitors to Cannes and its exhibitions can be assured that France is going to step up its security to maximum. An additional 10,000 soldiers have been deployed on its streets. A state of emergency has been extended by another three months. Border controls are being strengthened. Because Nice has been hit, it is going to get heightened security attention. Ditto with Cannes .
Expect visa formalities for those wanting to visit Schengen nations to get stricter (so please apply for your visas early; don’t make last minute applications). Expect airport security to be more vigilant. Already for the past six months visitors to Nice have had to go through an additional immigration check at the airport even if they have made their entry into Europe from another country.
Additionally, even the administrators of the towns of Nice and Cannes are going to take strong security measures to build confidence and really keep visitors safe. One has to only go back to the measures that the Palais des Festivals took after the 911 attacks, with body scans and X-ray machines. Queues used to be pretty long then.
Reed Midem is also going put its best behind making Mipcom –which is the next big event slated to take place from 15-20 October in Cannes – safer for attendees. And it has been known take extreme measures to support its clients. Like refunding money to clients who were afflicted by the floods during the festival last year. Like contributing to the Cannes city to help it in its rehabilitation.
Most agree that the only way to keep at bay those who want to damage nations and their people is to stay resolute and continue to do business as usual. Let us translate that into action.
(Anil Wanvari is the founder, editor in chief of the Indiantelevision.com group and also the India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh representative of Reed Midem’s Mipcom, MipTV, Midem and Mipim markets)
MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.
If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.
What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.
At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.
When OTT finally understood the time problem
For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”
That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.
What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.
Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:
* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing
* Completion rates continued to slide
* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer
At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.
Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.
Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.
There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.
By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.
This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.
In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.
Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.
Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift
ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.
From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.
What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:
* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle
While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.
Why audiences started responding differently
One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.
What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.
On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.
A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:
* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day
This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.
Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.
2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality
The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.
Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:
* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?
This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.
Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.
Failures Became Visible Faster
2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.
Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.
Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.
Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.
The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.
OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit
Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.
OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.
Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.
That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.
What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry
By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:
* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego
Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.
Looking Ahead
Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.
Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.
Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.
2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
