eNews
FanCode to exclusively broadcast India tour of West Indies in July
Mumbai: India’s premier digital sports destination FanCode has become the exclusive broadcaster for CWI until 2024, and will be the only platform streaming these matches live for Indian audiences. With this, FanCode has become the first-ever digital-only platform to host an India bilateral series and is expected to reach 10 crore sports fans.
The series will be played during India’s prime-time with ODIs starting at 7 pm and T20Is starting at 8 pm IST; and fans can watch the action live across FanCode app and its official website.
Cricket West Indies (CWI) and the board of control for cricket in India (BCCI) announced India’s tour of the West Indies to play three ODIs and five T20Is between 22 July and 07 August. The ODI series and three T20Is will be hosted across Trinidad and Tobago and St Kitts & Nevis, with the final two T20Is scheduled for Lauderhill, Florida in the USA.
FanCode has developed a comprehensive and immersive digital experience aimed at redefining sports consumption for fans in India. Fans can customize their experience and select their commentary language, statistics and analysis of choice through interactive overlays while watching the live stream. From Kohli’s beautiful straight drive to Rovman Powell’s clean power hitting, they will also be able to rewatch and relive any moment from the game almost in real-time. Another offering unique to FanCode is its focus on keeping the series accessible to all users with subscription options like Tour Pass and Match Pass, where fans can select and pay for the entire series or certain matches they want to watch.
The series is highly anticipated as India returns to the Caribbean after three years and will be led by new captains Rohit Sharma and Nicholas Pooran, with the latter taking over the reins from Kieron Pollard. The series will be a culmination of an action-packed summer for both the teams in the buildup to the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2022.
Speaking about this, Cricket West Indies CEO Johnny Grave said, “Our four-year deal with FanCode has brought Indian cricket fans closer to CWI’s live properties across multiple formats that has featured the top cricketing nations like South Africa, Pakistan, Australia and England. FanCode has become the go-to platform for Indian fans to consume cricket in a digital-first manner which has redefined the sports viewing experience.”
Commenting on the Tour, FanCode co-founder Prasana Krishnan said, “We are delighted to bring the iconic series to our consumers. Our long-term partnership with CWI is a testament of our commitment to providing our users with a fan-first digital experience. FanCode will ensure a customized and seamless experience, right from the choice of their preferred language, match graphics, and real-time highlights, to a multitude of subscription options.”
West Indies Captain Nicholas Pooran on the upcoming series, said, “We have a young team that is eager to restore the brand of cricket the West Indies team is known for playing. As I take charge of this team, our ambition is to always be competitive, as we look to use this series to fine tune our preparations for the upcoming T20 and 50 Over World Cups.”
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.
