iWorld
discovery+ fortifies its India play with star-studded originals
Mumbai: discovery+ has announced a slate of brand-new originals along with the return of its successful franchises ‘Star VS Food’ and ‘Mission Frontline’. The originals line-up includes ‘Say Yes to the Dress’, and ‘Money Mafia’.
Produced by ABP Studios, ‘Say Yes to the Dress’ is an Indian adaptation of one of the biggest American reality television series, giving Indian brides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as they search for their perfect wedding dress. Launching on 4 August, ‘Money Mafia’ takes an in-depth look at some of the biggest financial scams the country has ever seen from the perspective of the victims and the perpetrators. The show is produced by Chandra Talkies.
‘Star vs Food S2’ is produced in collaboration with Korea Tourism. It will feature popular celebs Ananya Panday, Anil Kapoor, Nora Fatehi, and Badshah trying to impress their family and friends with their cooking skills. Sara Ali Khan will be seen in the second season of ‘Mission Frontline’ returning in August.
“Our upcoming content slate demonstrates our constant determination of bringing original, full of life, bold and unexpected stories to our audience. By on-boarding personalities from different walks of life like Sports, Bollywood, music, and comedy among others, we have made a conscious effort at expanding our reach and engaging with a new set of audience,” said Discovery Inc, managing director – South Asia, Megha Tata. “We aim at using our platform as a medium to connect people through the art of storytelling and the line-up ranging from documentary to reality TV has something for every generation to enjoy, further strengthening our Family, Facts and Fun premise.”
Talking about his experience of being on the show, actor Anil Kapoor shared, “Despite my undeniable love for food, it is no secret that my expertise lies at eating and not cooking. Being blessed with excellent culinary artists in my home and family, I have never had to enter the kitchen to prepare a meal for myself. Star vs Food S2 set me up against the challenge of cooking a scrumptious meal for my loved ones and I must say, this was a much more daunting task than acting. Undoubtedly, it has been an exhilarating experience and I can’t wait to make my family proud with this new notch in my belt.”
“The announcement of a season 2 within a six-month span of the first season is a testament to the success of season one. We look forward to yet another delectable season full of fun, flavour and food,” Endemol Shine India CEO Abhishek Rege added.
BanijayAsia Founder & CEO, Deepak Dhar said, “Content consumption patterns have changed drastically in the last 2 years. People are consuming content faster and need more if they like a certain genre. With a plethora of content available to view on OTT platforms, it is immensely challenging, yet potentially lucrative for us to create stories that resonate with the audience. Our partnership with discovery+ gives us the freedom to work on different concepts as the brand is not limited to one genre. With our next special Mission Frontline with Sara Ali Khan, we have taken our relationship with Discovery to the next level after Into The Wild with Bear Grylls. We are confident that this show will deliver a special message we want to convey to our target audience and inspire them.”
discovery+ has also put together a specially curated watchlist including ‘Special Operations: India’, ‘Little Singham Desh ka Sipahi Blockbuster’, ‘India: 70 Wonders’, ‘India Marvels and Mysteries’, and more to commemorate the Independence month. Viewers will also have access to titles such as ‘Surviving R. Kelly’, ‘Could I Live There’, ‘MasterChef Canada’, and ‘Matilda & The Ramsay Bunch’.
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.
