iWorld
WITH 18 NEW ORIGINAL LAUNCHES AND NEW ASSOCIATIONS ALTBALAJI ENDS 2018 ON A HIGH NOTE
MUMBAI: ALTBalaji, one of the leading OTT platforms under the brand Balaji Telefilms Limited, has witnessed remarkable growth in 2018. With mass engaging content to the most riveting shows, the platform has emerged as the fastest growing and most talked about OTT platform in India. This year saw, the digital platform launch 18 new shows entertaining millions across the country. Awarded as the ITA Premier Web Channel award this year, ALTBalaji established its lead in the pack with the most-binged original series over the year in addition to winning other accolades.
While 2018 was the year of experimentation with highly-acclaimed shows like The Great Indian Dysfunctional Family (TGIDF), The Test Case and Home, ALTBalaji’s subscriber base grew pan-India with viewers enjoying a wide range of shows. Distinctive content in the series like ‘Broken but Beautiful’ and ‘Apharan’ have not only struck the right chords for their coming of age concepts but have also recorded higher viewership and top ratings of 8.8/10 and 9.2/10 on IMDb respectively. Other shows like ‘XXX: Uncensored’ and ‘KehneKoHumsafar Hain’ scored the highest completion rates. On an average, ALTBalaji’s subscribers have spent 77 minutes daily watching these shows. Shows like Home, The Test Case and TGIDF have not only won hearts of the audiences but also garnered rave reviews from the likes of Rajeev Masand, Mayank Shekhar, Rahul Desai and many more.
Here’s are 2018’s top binge watch shows ofALTBalaji:
Apharan: As the show title suggests, it is all about an ‘Apharan’ (kidnapping) that goes wrong. What makes this show a standout is the fact that top cop Rudra Srivastava is forced into kidnapping a girl at her own behest, and nothing goes to plan. He finds himself in a web of lies with a lot at stake. Set in the heartland of the country, the thriller truly enthralled the audience with its 70’s style masala entertainment and its upbeat retro music.
IMDB Rating: 9.2/10
Broken But Beautiful: When two broken hearts, Veer and Sameera are brought together by chance, sparks fly. The two get involved in a journey that requires them to accept how broken they are and how two broken pieces can probably belong together.
IMDB Rating: 8.8/10
The Great Indian Dysfunctional Family: General VikramjeetRanuat looks forward to a quiet life with his family post his accident while serving at the border. However, the re-entry of his separated brother and sister-in-law into his life changes the trajectory of his plans.
IMDB Rating: 7.6/10
The Test Case: Captain Shikha Sharma gears up to serve as the first female test case in combat. The series beautifully captures her struggles and challenges and encapsulates women-power in the true sense of the term.
IMDB Rating: 8.5/10
Home: The series is all about a beautiful family, the Sethis, who believe in loving one another dearly. However, they are faced with a mammoth challenge with they are served with an eviction notice. The heart-warming show features a man’s fight to save his own home.
IMDB Rating: 8.5/10
GandiiBaat: The power-packed show has it all – the crime, the twisted relationships and erotic content. The trifecta makes this show a great tale of how crossing the fine line of going to any lengths to fulfill desire comes with its own consequences.
IMDB Rating: 5.0 /10
Haq Se: A modern-day story that chronicles the lives of four sisters against the backdrop of theunrest in Kashmir. It is a tale of the sisters seeking happiness and fulfillment in their lives and wanting to trulyfollow their dreams and passion. This also marked the digital debute of Rajeev Khandelwal.
IMDB Rating: 8.3 /10
Hum: I am because of Us: Nothing compares to you sisters always having your back and that is the bond that the three sisters share. However, their relationship is put to test when the three arrive in the burgeoning metro of Mumbai to live their passion and follow their ambitions.
IMDB Rating: 7.6/10
With an end to a magnificent year, ALTBalaji has a highly anticipated line-up for 2019 across diverse genres with originals like GandiiBaat 2, KehneKoHumsafar Hain 2, Cold Lassi Aur Chicken Masala, Puncchbeat, The Verdict State Vs Nanavati and Cartel. Audiences are surely going to be entertained by a content library that is not only varied but new and captivating as well.
ALTBalaji’s original content is available in four Indian languages which includes Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and Malayalam. Additionally it is also available in Malaysia Bahasa, Indonesia Bahasa and Arabic languages. With several strategic associations, ALTBalaji’s shows can be viewed on Amazon Fire TV stick, OLA Play, LG Smart TVs using WebOS , the MI TV Patchwall in addition to the OTT services’ mobile apps and desktop platform. Viewers can also avail the app on 5 different devices in order to make it enjoyable for the entire family.
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.
