iWorld
FLYX, a social network platform for personalised OTT content, raises $200K in pre-seed funding
NEW DELHI: Delhi- and New York-based, FLYX, a first-of-its-kind social network platform for OTT content, announced that it has raised a pre-seed funding amounting to $200K by HNIs. The company will use the funds to accelerate product development and further expand services in India.
Founded by seasoned technologists Shashank and Mayank, FLYX is a streaming social network that helps users find recommended content to watch, on the back of a unique algorithm that aggregates reviews from friends, family and contacts across all major streaming platforms. The app is available for free download on both iOS and Android stores, and works across all streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar, Hulu, Google Play among others.
The value that FLYX provides is reducing time in decision making, and being able to find positive reviews from your social network, aligned to personal taste. Just by logging in, users can see what their contacts have recommended, and make informed choices. Users can also create a unified cross-platform watch-list, and keep track of shows watched in a private “seen list.” The platform lets them cross-post on social media platforms including Instagram and Snapchat. An interactive platform, where users can engage with their followers through the private or group chat feature – FLYX also enables watching trailers, and exchanging notes and comments with followers about new and upcoming releases.
“It’s fantastic to have the support of our investors as we look to grow and scale FLYX in India. We have seen encouraging growth over the last few months, and we consider this to be the right time to scale our operations, and to strengthen our position as the one-stop-shop for reviews, feedback and updates for all entertainment across major streaming platforms in India. Our immediate plan is to enhance our technology, add more streaming platforms and social networking platforms, to provide users a more comprehensive experience. We are thankful to our investors for the opportunity to tap into their capital, knowledge and network,” said FLYX CEO and co-founder Shashank Singh.
“Shashank and Mayank are two of the most impressive entrepreneurs and technologists I've come across. Their ability to identify a need in the marketplace and quickly adapt to consumers needs positions them beautifully in this constantly changing marketplace. With content consumption at an all time high, the need for a utility like FLYX is undeniable and I am supremely confident that Shashank and Mayank are the right founders to scale this business and take it to the next level,” said AIT Global Inc investor chairman and founder Raj Mishra.
Key features
What to watch: Use FLYX to know what friends and family are recommending and let them know what your favorites are.
Discover trending and search: Be updated with what movies and shows are trending across various platforms. No need to Google anymore.
Where to watch: Once you know what to watch, FLYX will help you know where to watch. The platform is linked to 100+ streaming providers including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, Hulu, iTunes, Quibi, Apple TV+, HBO, Google Play, Fandango, CBS, NBC, and many more.
Create fun stories: Users can create new kinds of stories available only on FLYX. Stories can be about your favorite shows or you can ask questions, or let your friends know what you are watching. Post these fun stories to your Instagram and Snapchat too.
Watch trailers: One central place to see all trailers in a fun way and share trailers with your friends and also post on your social networks.
Unified watch-list across platforms: FLYX you can create your watchlist on the go and add movies and shows in one central place regardless of where they are available.
KPMG in its latest report, ‘Unravelling the digital video consumer’ estimated that India will have more than 500 million online video subscribers by FY 2023. This would make it the second-biggest market in the world after China. The report also highlights that Indians continue to love their movies and movie related content. Original content is also emerging in a big way with a reasonable preference by respondents as compared to the supply of original content on platforms currently.
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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.
