iWorld
India premium VOD revenues top $1B in 1H 2024
Mumbai: The premium video-on-demand (VOD) category, driven by advertising and subscription, generated $1.04 billion in revenues over 1H 2024, up 38 per cent from $760 million in 1H 2023. Local content accounted for 86 per cent of premium VOD engagement in 1H 2024, with live sports and local drama & romance leading category demand. Sports content attracted the highest number of unique viewers, with nine of the top 15 titles belonging to the sports genre – six of which were BCCI events. Cricket was the standout, as IPL 2024 and the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2024 were the top two sports properties, driving significant viewership.
The take-outs were revealed by the latest analysis conducted by ampd, the digital measurement platform owned and operated by Media Partners Asia (MPA), which measures consumption and engagement across the digital economy in India, including VOD. In 1H 2024, a total of 8 trillion minutes were streamed across online video platforms in India. YouTube dominated the landscape, capturing 92 per cent of all online video consumption, while premium platforms—comprising AVOD, freemium, and SVOD services—accounted for the remaining eight per cent. Within the premium video segment, freemium platforms led with 92 per cent of the 645 bil minutes streamed during the same period.
Jio Cinema, Netflix, and Disney+ Hotstar led premium VOD category monetisation, contributing 70 per cent of the total revenues garnered by the category. Jio Cinema was the category leader in 1H 2024 with 36 per cent revenue share while Netflix led pure-play SVOD monetization with a 38 per cent share.
Premium VOD ad revenue in 1H 2024 was driven by Jio Cinema and Disney+ Hotstar, leveraging marquee cricket with the Indian Premiere League (IPL) and ICC World Cup. After a turbulent CY2023, total SVOD subscriptions rebounded from 110 million to 120 million in 1H 2024. India’s TAM of affluent audiences continues to expand, with Netflix and Prime Video capitalising on this trend through investments in local originals and films. Together, these platforms accounted for nearly 70 per cent of SVOD revenue in 1H 2024. Meanwhile, Jio Cinema’s launch of an affordable plan has further broadened the SVOD audience, incentivising more users to pay for streaming content.
Commenting on the findings, MPA India vice president Mihir Shah said, “Subscriber growth momentum will continue in 2H 2024, driven by aggregation and deeper partnerships with telcos, pay-TV operators, and OEMs. In addition, with the onset of the festive season at, advertising spending should be robust in Q4 2024. However, with no major sports events, spending will shift toward tentpole non-fiction shows on premium VOD platforms, with a significant portion moving back to high-reach UGC platforms. Netflix and Prime Video have a steady stream of content planned for 2H 2024. For freemium platforms, entertainment spends have started to come back under new advertising-friendly formats like TV++, which are similar to daily TV soap operas with 40-120 plus episodes per season. These formats have proven to attract new users and drive engagement with lower budgets.”
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.
