iWorld
GUEST ARTICLE: Why content creators need to embrace OTT platforms for better growth and impact
Mumbai: OTT (over-the-top) services have received a lot of attention in the last three years, completely transforming the way we consume information online. OTT platforms are significantly altering the landscape of the entertainment and media industries. OTT services are classified into several groups based on the type of content, helping both innovative content creators and brands gain better visibility and engagement among a wider set of global audiences. With access to internet video material, artists and content creators also have an opportunity to build a brand out of their work, which will lead to organic development and popularity among viewers.
With the versatility of gadgets, modern consumers are more accustomed to consuming video material at any time and from any location. According to a PWC analysis, India’s OTT video industry would grow at a 21.8 per cent CAGR from Rs 4,464 crore in 2018 to Rs 1,1976 crore in 2023.
From large companies to start-ups, everyone is welcoming OTT platforms for innovative and data-driven campaigns. This also provides content creators with an opportunity to drive better brand partnerships, find sponsors, and build a stronger viewer base for themselves, as well as enjoy a wider reach to viewers via dedicated OTT platforms.
In line with the above, having a dedicated OTT platform and building a niche ecosystem can have several benefits for content creators, like:
1. Better engagement
OTT platforms have enormous potential for expansion. The enormous market makes it all feasible, but before proceeding, one needs to understand the approach to engaging the audience. OTT enables content makers to create content that increases engagement. It provides a diverse range of materials to choose from based on the consumer’s preferences. Consumers, on the other hand, have increased viewing independence in terms of location, device, time, and quality of options.
Additionally, OTT platforms also help the audience to locate new material quickly and effortlessly, which will undoubtedly lead to success for content providers.
2. Increases brand awareness
OTT platforms are excellent at preserving an image that will improve your audience’s reach. On a regular basis, almost 70 per cent of users watch at least three hours of video streaming services. According to a different survey, video accounts for 82 per cent of all consumer web traffic. So it’s evident that digital and video are here to stay. Any brand, person, or organisation that can successfully combine these two. Owning an OTT platform will aid in improving brand exposure, increasing reach, and gaining more consumer loyalty.
3. Focus on your target audience
OTT platforms clearly identify their target audience, followed by enticing and relevant advertising based on their target group’s interests, which increases the ads’ views and reach. The OTT network’s 5G network is based on fixed wireless access video transmission. 5G will encourage high-quality consumption in households, thus enlarging the advertising area. Focus on a certain target first, then expand your reach after you have a clear understanding of the OTT audience.
4. Monetization model
Content producers now have the resources and flexibility to pursue their passions. They might monetize their material in a single or several ways. These include ad-supported video-on-demand (AVoD), subscription video-on-demand (SVoD), and a hybrid approach, i.e., ad-supported video with a subscription mode. The service provider or creator should select the most appropriate model for the platform. It all depends on your target audience.
Every content producer has a strong desire to increase the exposure of his or her own brand in the entertainment industry. And with a strategically planned platform, it is possible for large and small content creators to generate revenue and make an impact in the market through a well-planned and managed platform.
The author of this article is Ssoftoons COO Hansa Mondal.
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.
