iWorld
HT Labs is a hub for all product, tech, and thought leadership: Avinash Mudaliar
Mumbai: Launched in April 2020, HT Media’s innovation hub for digital-first products – HT Labs has built a diverse portfolio of products spanning edtech (HT School), fintech (MintGenie), OTT (OTTplay), food (Slurrp), and digital publishing (Upublish) in the B2B and B2C domains in just 18 months.
While OTTplay is a content discovery and recommendation platform that aggregates information from over 50 OTT platforms in Indian and Asia, HT Schools, with its focus on holistic learning and development, has nearly 40-45 courses in collaboration with well-known names such as Shaan and Sabrina Merchant among others.
Digital Publishing platform Upublish, though catering to independent writers and journalists as well, is largely a B2B product targeting small and medium publishers. MintGenie is a fintech app intended as a ‘learn, earn, and grow ecosystem’ for those with little or no knowledge of investing.
HT Labs is led by publishing industry veteran Avinash Mudaliar who is the company’s co-founder and CEO. He likes to describe it as “a start-up hub where all product, tech, and thought leadership happens.” His team comprises over 150 professionals across technology, product, design, content, and editorial. Earlier this month HT Labs launched its fifth brand Slurrp in the food space under Mudaliar’s leadership.
How Slurrp was founded
Slurrp, with its over three lakh recipes, was born out of the problem that there are a lot of recipes out there but it becomes very difficult to narrow down on that which fits one’s choice of cuisine, health consideration, regional choices, ingredient preferences, and allergy considerations, all at the same time.
“During last year’s lockdowns the number of searches on things as elementary as “how to cook rice in a microwave or how to store vegetables” skyrocketed as people staying home became wary of ordering food online. The struggle to figure out these basics was compounded by the fact that there was no one place to find all related information. That’s when HT Labs decided to solve this problem using AI and launched India’s first recommendation engine for recipes – Slurrp,” shares Mudaliar.
Slurrp’s TG includes all those who ‘live to eat’ and ‘eat to live,’ and therefore, it effectively serves the needs of all interested users across levels of proficiency in cooking. The app is currently being monetised through affiliate shopping models, sponsorships and ads.
The recipe – just the right mix of content and technology
Mudaliar tells us that Slurrp was launched with an equal focus on content and tech wherein apart from collating new and age-old recipes at one place the intent was to build conversations and stories around food. The app takes users on culinary trails charting the history of the most familiar as well as the most exotic of their favourite food and beverages.
There are plans to launch a community feature in the next couple of weeks to provide a platform for chefs, influencers, and enthusiasts to exchange ideas. “Because not all information is documented, and a lot of hacks and interesting trivia – the grandmothers’ secrets – come out only during conversations, this information can later be integrated into the mother app and recipes or conversations with the end-users with the help of AI,” he says.
More features in the offing include an AI-based personal assistant to take people through their cooking journey, enhanced filters, language personalisation, and voice recipes. At present, the app has only textual and video recipes in English.
Some of the uniquely interesting filters that Mudaliar’s team is exploring include those around food combinations and mood-based recipes. “Food and music consumption are very similar in the sense that mood plays a very important role in how a person eats. We are exploring ways to offer personalised recommendations to satisfy these not-easily-definable features,” he states.
Mudaliar’s most important consideration while designing the app was to solve for the barrier of entry by keeping the interface simple. “We didn’t want to change user behaviour or break any paradigms, so we incorporated features such as ‘swipe left, swipe right’ that most people are used to, and further simplified on that. The idea is to make users comfortable, enhance their cooking experience and get them to spend more time on the app by offering easy access to content,” he remarks.
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.
