iWorld
Sanjeev Kapoor cooks up a storm on You Tube
MUMBAI: Sanjeev Kapoor the celebrity chef created a new landmark by crossing 300,000 subscribers and 100 million views on You Tube making him the India’s largest individual channel. Sanjeev Kapoor has been always up the curve on technology and yet again has proved that in spite of coming from a niche space like food he can rule the digital medium. Sanjeev Kapoor has partnered with ZengaTV and One Digital Entertainment to manage his digital properties.
One Digital Entertainment Pvt. Ltd., the largest MCN (multi-channel network) for YouTube in India is managing content strategy, audience development and planning for Sanjeev Kapoor’s YouTube Channel.
On this occasion of success and his birthday on the 10th April, Zenga Media Pvt. Ltd which owns his YouTube rights, has decided to release Official YouTube Video Mobile App of Sanjeev Kapoor. This app offers opportunity to his fans to stay in touch with him through live interactions apart from new recipe videos, images of Sanjeev Kapoor, fans will be able to use this app to stay socially connected with Sanjeev through Facebook, Twitter and Fun2shoot.
Commenting on the App, Mr. Sanjeev Kapoor said, “I have received an overwhelming response from my fans on my You Tube India channel. This provides an entire new way for me to communicate with my fans and give them a new and unique content experience! I had a great deal of fun working with the Zenga team in customizing and extending the YouTube channel and social media in to an app and really appreciate this collaboration and giving my fans another way to follow my cooking and stay connected to me. This inspiring app gives everyone the chance to learn and practice a whole range of skills as well as providing hours of cooking that can be enjoyed by the whole family.”
Commenting on the partnership and launch of new app, Mr. Abhishek Joshi, CEO-Zenga Media Pvt. Ltd, said “We have different strategy and attitude on different platforms customizing it to what works best on the given platform to celebrities. We attribute the growth of numbers to the content created for the platform. We kept innovating on the properties and changed strategy from time to time to keep the users engaged and interested.”
He further adds Sanjeev Kapoor app gives users a behind-the-scenes glimpse into his lifestyle. Zenga’s comprehensive mobile platform and unique app development solutions, provides a new channel for fans to directly engage with Sanjeev Kapoor, while building brand loyalty and increasing his digital audience. Zenga has exclusively partnered with OneDigtal for all the Youtube distribution through their MCN network, as they are the experts in this space.
Commenting on the partnership, Mr. Gurpreet Singh, COO of OneDigital Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. said “We have been in the original content creation space for more than a year now and managing over 70+ artists and Sanjeev Kapoor is one of our favorite. We create innovative content and concepts for today’s digital audience. It’s great to work with Sanjeev Kapoor as he understands the power of Digital Platforms and is open to experiment with it.”
He further adds Digital medium has grown to be the epicenter of marketing and communication across all brands and celebrities. Since our launch a year back, One Digital has been connecting fans to their favorite icons/ celebrities in an effective and exciting manner. We are humbled on our association with Sanjeev Kapoor and we look forward to a committed and an exciting endeavor with him. Our expertise in Digital Space will ensure that we continue exploring path breaking initiatives and add value to our clients.
The application is available for all IOS, Windows and Android mobile and Tab users. Fans can download this free of cost from iTunes App Store for iPhone/ iPad and Google Play for Android users and Windows store for Windows users.
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.
