iWorld
For an average Indian viewer, distinction between original and adapted content is often irrelevant: Mautik Tolia
Mumbai: With over 3000+ hours of content produced across 50+ shows for major broadcasters and OTT platforms, Bodhitree Multimedia Ltd specializes in drama, thriller, horror, comedy, and lifestyle genres. Their services encompass producing, directing, writing, dubbing, mixing, subtitling, content editing, and localization for a variety of media including television, films, and digital platforms, operating primarily on a B2B business model.
The company operates in three main verticals: Broadcast – Hindi General Entertainment, Content for OTT platforms, and Regional Content across languages such as Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, and Gujarati for broadcast and digital. By focusing on trending and edgy themes, Bodhitree has established a strong reputation in the Indian media industry, becoming a preferred partner for many broadcasters and OTT platforms, thanks to their versatile and high-quality productions.
Bodhitree most recently launched Gunaah on Hotstar, Class on Netflix. Other titles under Bodhitree include Fuh se Fantasy, The Gone Game, Marzi, The Raikar Case, among others.
Indiantelevision.com reached out to Bodhitree Multimedia’s managing director Mautik Tolia, where he highlighted their significant content consumption growth, adaptations, new ventures and much more…
Edited excepts
Your recent show “Gunaah” on Disney+ Hotstar has been a significant success with 3.4 million views. What factors do you attribute to its popularity, and how does it fit into BTML’s overall content strategy?
When we examined the original Turkish content, we found it to be highly plot-driven and filled with raw emotions. These elements resonate strongly with the Indian audience due to their deep-rooted appeal in pulpy storytelling, themes of revenge, drama, and family betrayal. Recognizing this, we tailored the content into a love story, confident that it would connect well with Indian audiences, particularly those who consume Hotstar. This approach has proven successful, garnering a very positive response for the show.
BTML has been actively expanding into new ventures such as media rights management and studio facilities. How do these new ventures complement your core business of content production?
Our strategy involves vertical expansion within our existing businesses, addressing specific infrastructure needs within the industry. We aim to fill crucial gaps in the market, ensuring we meet growing demands effectively.
With the establishment of subsidiaries focusing on regional content like Marathi and Bhojpuri, how important is regional language content to BTML’s growth strategy, and what are your future plans in this segment?
Regional content plays an important role in our strategy, given its exponential growth potential, especially through OTT platforms as internet penetration increases. While Hindi remains a dominant market, regional languages such as Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali are gaining significant traction in content consumption, mirroring trends seen in traditional broadcasting. We are poised to capitalize on this shift by producing tailored content in regional languages.
BTML reported a 50% revenue growth in FY24 and an EBITDA margin of 14.23%. What were the key drivers behind this growth, and how do you plan to sustain this momentum in the coming years?
Key drivers behind this growth is that our expanded content strategy is more inclusive than before, encompassing a wider range of platforms beyond TV and OTT. This diversification includes the establishment of subsidiaries and other strategic initiatives, reflecting our commitment to broader market coverage and sustained growth.
Adaptations like “Class” on Netflix have been well-received. Could you elaborate on your thoughts on adapting international content for the Indian audience?
For an average Indian viewer, the distinction between original and adapted content is often irrelevant; what matters most is the quality and appeal of the content itself. Whether an adaptation of an international series or a homegrown production, viewers judge based on its merits rather than its origins.
As the managing director, what is your vision for BTML in the next 5-10 years, and how do you plan to position the company amidst competition and changing consumer preferences?
The industry is undergoing rationalization, and we position ourselves to serve all verticals of content creation comprehensively. Our trajectory aims to encompass diverse languages, genres, and formats, ensuring a versatile presence in the content creation landscape.
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.
