iWorld
Deepak Dhar, Nikhil Madhok on Hotstar Specials show, content creation, consumption trends
MUMBAI: Hotstar’s bid to create big, bold and authentic stories and innovate across formats and genres for its much-anticipated Specials landed the streaming service a collaboration with Deepak Dhar’s Banijay Asia and MS Dhoni’s Dhoni Entertainment for its first show. The mini-series, ‘Roar of the Lion’, is a behind-the-scenes look at the incredible comeback story of Chennai Super Kings (CSK) going on to win the 2018 Indian Premier League (IPL) off the back of a two-year ban.
“It’s not just about cricket but the human spirit of fighting back. So it didn’t actually take much time for us to say that we should do this together and then Deepak and team have worked really hard to make this come alive,” says Hotstar EVP and head original content Nikhil Madhok.
Dhar, who was struck by the idea during the last IPL season, believes a comeback story of this nature hasn’t really been told from a sports and entertainment perspective.
“That space itself is a virgin space and something which is very unique to us and if Mahi [MS Dhoni] was to really lead it and tell us himself how he was doing it, there’s a great space for a show there. So that’s where I started putting the jigsaw puzzle and took it across to Nikhil and Gaurav [Banerjee] at Hotstar and then we started together collaboratively building this,” recounts Dhar.
For Dhar, it was the coming together of the right story, right platform and right people to embark on this journey. Hotstar as a brand is widely considered as the home of cricket in India. With over 150 monthly active users, the platform was a natural fit for a show of this nature. Having recognised the power of the story, the streaming service plans to throw its might behind the show making it available in multiple languages. Going forward, there’s a good chance of Star Network’s formidable repertoire being leveraged to maximise the penetration of this show.
In order to ensure reach, every product needs to be marketed and promoted right. While Dhar is the creative force behind the project, does he have a say in how Hotstar presents the show to its consumers?
“I’m not involved, but I do have a bit of a say there. There are specialists and people who know that side of the game better than I do. I understand the content and the creative or the production side of the game so obviously, after a point you’ve got to let go, you’ve got to say everybody is obviously putting their best foot forward. But I do have a say on how this should be put out,” argues Dhar.
Documentaries, as a genre, remains largely untapped in India, often not even seen as a mainstream entertainment medium. While Dhar is a tad nervous ahead of the show streaming, he’s also convinced that Dhoni’s story is bound to become a trendsetter for the genre.
“I think with this show, that’s really bound to change. We’re exploring this in an untold manner, so there is a little nervousness as being one of the creators. But I think it is going to be very fresh, very different from the way you see either a documentary or a scripted series,” the former Endemol Shine India boss points out.
While the story is bound to excite fans of Dhoni and CSK a great deal, the makers also expect a lot of young people to form the core viewing group for the show.
“I think when people will log in, I suspect that they will find it difficult to slot it in a particular genre. Hopefully, they’ll just say that this was a really inspirational tale,” adds Madhok.
While Hotstar and Banjijay could end up joining forces for another show post ‘Roar of the Lion’, the latter is in the midst of developing a diverse range of projects catered for viewing on platforms as part of its joint venture with Dhoni Entertainment.
“This is what all producers and all content creators have been waiting for and it has finally happened with all kinds of content being accepted,” Dhar states.
While the industry has slowly veered towards finite storytelling in the last five to seven years, Dhar says a mini-series would have found no takers a year ago.
“People wouldn’t have even entertained this conversation, but today they are wanting to collaborate on it. So obviously things have really changed, forget in the last five years, in the last 12 to 24 months things have really changed,” he says.
Madhok describes India as a unique market that will continue to witness the growth of both TV and digital. He sees a great deal of innovation in content, with both mediums delivering a fantastic amount of variation.
“Digital is about individual consumption and that also means that you need to cater to much wide array of tastes and that’s what’s driving the whole thrust towards a huge amount finite consumption,” he highlights.
The IPL spot-fixing scandal remains among the biggest and most controversial cricket stories of our times. Given the subject, protagonists and the secrecy around the entire affair, Hotstar and Banijay seem to have a sure shot winner on their hands. In fact, Madhok articulates rather aptly.
“Usually either the ideas tend to be niche or the platforms tend to be niche. For the first time, we are putting together an idea which is massive on a platform which is the country’s biggest. I think the marrying of those two will hopefully produce a fairly dramatic result,” he sums up.
Is a sequel in the offing?
“I think the story has great merit to come back because it has some strong magnets, but obviously we have to get the first one out of the way,” Dhar responds with a smile.
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.
