iWorld
Asian SVOD service: Star Online partners Xstream & Diagnal
MUMBAI: Xstream, a leading provider of OTT solutions, and Diagnal, Asia’s regional OTT specialists has announced that they are powering the new Video On Demand (VOD) service called dimsum. The VOD service is operated by Star Online, a subsidiary of the Star Media Group.
It is a subscription-based VOD service with exclusive Asian content prized at RM 15 (Rs 148.5) per month. The online High Definition (HD) video service offers five concurrent users on one single account, on five different devices.
While Xstream’s modular and cloud-based OTT Platform, Xstream MediaMaker, is the backbone of the new multiscreen VOD solution, Diagnal has custom designed and developed the dimsum website, Android apps, iOS apps including their video players.
“In Chinese, dimsum literally translates to ‘selection of the heart’ or ‘order to your heart’s content’ and this is exactly what we want to do for our audience with dimsum. Provide them with exclusive and compelling content with an easy user experience,” said dimsum chief marketing officer Lam Swee Kim. “By leveraging Xstream’s OTT platform and Diagnal’s remarkable industry knowledge, world class design and on time delivery focus, we have been able to launch dimsum in record time. Moreover the partnership has allowed us to focus on our core business – to serve premium and exclusive Asian content.”
The Star Media Group which is primarily a news and media organization has embarked on a second phase of its digital transformation plan with the launch of dimsum, its own online video on demand service. A part of the group’s plan is to stay ahead of the game and to reinvent its business.
“Working with Star Media Group on launching dimsum with very ambitious launch dates, has been tremendously rewarding. With dimsum, Star Online will now be able to create new revenue streams”, said Xstream CEO Laurits Tygesen. “We are excited and honored to work with one of the most innovative media companies in the Asia Pacific region and provide them with the tools to stay competitive and satisfy the growing appetite of today’s viewers. Joining forces with superb tech partners like Diagnal, also allows us to provide our customers with best in-class technology, in-depth knowledge and proven experience.”
With the launch of dimsum, Star is taking on the battle with global and regional VOD services that have launched in Malaysia in the last couple of years, with the difference being that dimsum focuses only on Asian content.
“As broadband speeds and smartphone penetration increases, we are seeing independent studios, media organisations and broadcasters across the Asia region reinventing their businesses with premium video streaming services. New entrants need to hit the ground running with a great service, then be ready to scale, to compete and to continue to innovate. We are very happy to see our latest customer Star Online launch dimsum successfully. It has been a great team effort between Star Online, Xstream and Diagnal. Diagnal has provided world class UIUX design for dimsum. Diagnal has also developed the dimsum apps and website including a fully featured video player supporting multiple DRM standards, multiple subtitles and multiple audio. Our team of seasoned OTT industry professionals has helped the dimsum service launch quickly and with high quality,” added Diagnal CEO Reuben Verghese.
Solution highlights
Dimsum is an exclusive subscription VOD service by Star Online, powered by Xstream MediaMaker, using AWS to deliver unparalleled performance and durability
A subscription based Video-on-Demand service with exclusive Asian content being the primary differentiator
For a monthly Subscription service (SVOD) consumers pay RM15 per month targeting young, connected and new age audiences.
Available across connected devices including Web, Android and iOS with more devices on the roadmap
Five concurrent users per account on five different devices
Parental control with Kids model
Dimsum will be screened in HD with no interruption or buffering
World class user experience with advanced video player features including multiple DRM, multiple audio languages and multiple subtitles.
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.
