iWorld
Aashram was viewed by users from 2500+ cities: MX Player’s Gautam Talwar
KOLKATA: How do you spend time when a virus has taken away all the usual options of outside home entertainment? The answer lies in screens. For most of the country, the television sets and the six-inch screens have served as source of entertainment since the onset of the pandemic. But at the beginning of the lockdown, there was a dearth of fresh television content as well. As a result, over-the-top (OTT) platforms in the country emerged as the alternative for a new wave of users along with the existing consumers.
Times Internet’s “bold bet” MX Player is one of them. It has witnessed a huge surge in user base during this period. As MX Player chief content officer Gautam Talwar says “it has been quite crazy”. While the platform has kept content flow usual with launch of around ten shows during this period, the user engagement has gone beyond expectation in all metrics, as Talwar shares without divulging the exact numbers. Thanks to a host of new releases, the consumers shifting from the linear mode of content consumption to watching on-demand content have exploded even after unlock.
According to Talwar, the platform has broken all the records after the launch of Aashram which was in production for more than two years. He claims the show has recorded 250 million + streams within 15-18 days of its launch. With this show, the platform has witnessed the number of screens growing exponentially as well as a dramatic upsurge in watch time. Some northern markets like Delhi NCR have responded very well to the show.
As per the data shared by him, Aashram was viewed by users from 2500+ cities ranging from metropolitan to rural cities. While it was liked by users across all the cities, however the affinity in tier I (Jaipur, Pune, Ahmedabad etc) and tier II (Agra. Ludhiana, Meerut, Chandigarh, Ranchi etc) was higher than the metropolitan cities, precisely 1.2 times more higher. Although he did not share exact number, he added that there are more than enough viewers that are binge watching Aashram.
“It was conceptualised two years ago by the MX content team and we were sure that this is a fascinating world and must be explored. So, we got Habib Faisal on board to write the story and the bible first and then Kuldeep Ruhil to write the screenplay and dialogues for the show. Thereafter, we took it to Prakash Jha who along with his team also added a whole lot to the writing process along with the MX team and that's how the show got conceptualised. The genre was chosen because data suggests that crime dramas are something that our core audience loves and consumes in quantity and hence it was a no brainer.” Talwar comments.
MX Player did not leave any stone unturned to promote the marquee content. While all the major OTT platforms halted outdoor campaigns during the lockdown, Aashram romanced with billboards. The platform went for a 360 degree campaign and the media mix included radio along with TV and digital.
Aashram is helping in overall engagement as well. The cohort of users who are coming to the platform to watch this particular show are sampling other content from the similar genre leading to a higher retention rate. However, it is not unique to this particular show only.
“Once a new user comes on the platform, they discover the content slate and then they cherry pick. All metrics of engagement have gone up because of this trend. They come for one show and sample other shows and the fact that they stay on is a testament to good content being on the platform,” Talwar opines.
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Hence, it is apprehensible why the parent company is not shying away from investing more in the platform. In the annual report of Times Internet, vice chairman Satyan Gajwani said: “Two years ago, we made our largest acquisition, and it was a bold bet: that we could build a video streaming platform atop a local video player, developing and licensing compelling content to build a new user habit on an existing app. I’m extremely pleased with our results… In less than 18 months, MX Player now engages over 200 million monthly users, making MX Player the largest premium video destination in India.”
While most of the major OTT players in India are now going for the subscription-based model, MX Player is the one which has not taken its content behind paywall yet. Thanks to the scale of users, the platform is attracting major brands.
Talwar says the appetite for good content has gone up as users are getting more aquatinted with premium content. “The pressure is now to deliver more,” he states. “All the data mining that we do basis how the shows are doing, the pressure is going to get even more accurate. The more you know, the pressure is to make sure to deliver to your particular audience. My audience may be slightly different from other OTT platform because we are a mass-market channel. Our core audience lies in tier II-tier III towns. Therefore, we are trying to understand what they like because they are also experiencing digital for the first time,” he adds.
Thanks to feedback on metrics like completion rate, watching pattern of users, the platform is fine-tuning its content strategy. It has also noticed that the sweet spot of an episode’s length ranges between 20-40 minutes.
Recently, MX Player also forayed into short form video with the launch of the new platform. But it is also experimenting with long-form content as well. “There is a show that we are looking at in terms of interactivity. Right now, we are at writing stages of it. We have to see how to build that level of functionality once we kind of get to that,” Talwar states.
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.
