iWorld
ALTBalaji launched, to create 250+ hrs of original content this year
MUMBAI: Undisputed leaders in the world of television and cinema Balaji Telefilms announced their arrival in the digital world through the launch of mobile platform ALTBalaji today. ALTBalaji has been launched with the vision to create original shows for India & Indians abroad, for consumption on their personal devices at location/time/show of their choice!
The platform will offer 250+ hours of original, exclusive content to its subscribers. This ad free, subscription-based platform will be commercially available with few of these original shows from 16 April.
After conquering the world of television, Balaji Telefilms and Ekta Kapoor are all set to claim her throne on digital entertainment space with the OTT platform ALTBalaji.
The shows on video on demand platform are created by the best talent of Indian entertainment industry including critically acclaimed directors and actors. The long illustrious list of artists comprises of Nagesh Kukunoor, Juhi Chawla, Nimrat Kaur, Rajkumar Rao, Hansal Mehta, Sakshi Tanwar, Ram Kapoor, Atul Kulkarni, Sameer Soni, Yudhishtar Urs, Dipannita Sharma Atwal, and many more.
Commenting on the launch, Balaji Telefilms joint managing director Ekta Kapoor said, “Indian entertainment audience is evolving and so are we at Balaji, with ALTBalaji we are officially identifying our audience as individuals and not groups/family. We are entering into their most personal space- mobile phones and this empowers them to really watch what they want, at the time & location of their choice and not what single TV family is habituated to. ALTBalaji’s shows will open new world of home grown differentiated entertainment to the viewers with the best stories and artists.”
Balaji Telefilms group CEO Sameer Nair said, “We are proud to bring ALTBalaji to the Indian viewers, this is an alternate to their regular entertainment options- TV, Bollywood Films and foreign English content. We fit right between these options and with the plummeting digital divide across Indian cities we found a perfect space to showcase our content, digital platform. We tied up with multiple partners to ensure smooth navigation and subscription payment option, creating an unparalleled user experience on the app.”
ALTBalaji CEO Nachiket Pantvaidya said, “The most endearing feature of ALTBalaji is its content, we are launching with the promise to bring fresh and never heard of stories to our viewers. While we are starting with 5 shows, it will be followed by a new show every 15 days for the binge watch lovers. On one hand we offer story of India’s first female in combative role- THE TEST CASE on the other we have most loved TV stars in KARRLE TU BHI MOHABBAT. It is intriguing and fresh story-telling.”
Features of ALTBalaji app
ALTBalaji is fully cloud based, to deliver incomparable performance and durability, ensuring high performance video delivery to all subscribers. ALTBalaji’s highlights include:
● A subscription based Video-on-Demand service with original and exclusive premium content at competitive prices to customers
● 5 episodes of every show free for viewing & less than Rs.1/day thereon
● Service across multiple connected devices with seamless cross device user experience
● Parental control allowing kids to watch kids content and giving them no access to other content
Details of shows
· The Test Case- directed by national award winning director Nagesh Kukunoor, the show stars Nimrat Kaur as THE TEST CASE prepping to be the Indian Army’s first woman test case in a combat role. It is an inspirational story about her passion and struggle to prove her worth as a combative soldier. The impressive cast includes Juhi Chawla, Atul Kulkarni and Rahul Dev.
· Boygiri- it is fun, pure, unadulterated, slaphappy comic story of boys next door. Boygiri is an authentic take on “men will be boys” and the overarching awkwardness of being boys.
· Romil and Jugal- this is ALTBalaji’s fresh take on Shakespeare’s famous tale of Romeo and Juliet but with a twist. An emotional love story of two boys- Romil and Jugal who hails from different family and cultural backgrounds.
· Karrle Tu Bhi Mohabbat- Starring the famous duo Sakshi Tanwar and Ram Kapoor, this is a story of two opposite people who cross each other’s paths suddenly and how it has an everlasting impact on their lives.
· Bewaffa Sii Wafaa- a matured, complicated love story of two married people, married to other people. This emotionally charged story opens multiple layers off a relations between married couples and explores what happens when one of them finds loves outside marriage.
· Dev DD- Imagine Devdas with a bottle of vodka, now replace Devdas with Devika Dharmendra Dwivedi! This is a twisted tale of Devika (Dev DD) who is not a ‘so called good girl’ and loves everything that is complicated in life.
ALTBalaji’s 250+ hours of original and exclusive content offers a wide range of genres, the package has something for every viewer. Shows in regional language are also in pipeline for the platform, Maya Thirrai- a Tamil thriller drama will soon be available to viewers. ALTBalaji will offer extensive range of shows in various languages and genres to all age group and regions, both in India and abroad.
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.
