iWorld
Indian diaspora remains sustainable audience for OTTs
MUMBAI: With the Indian diaspora spread out all over the world, media enterprises have found them to be a worthy group to target. Over-the-top (OTT) players, especially, are finding the diaspora audience a rewarding pursuit. Some platforms use Bollywood to grab their attention while others are targeting millennial audiences with original content.
One the one hand you have players that believe in stock content. Yupp TV has been at the forefront of targeting Indian diaspora through catch-up content. Realising the scarcity of Indian entertainment content for the expat community, Uday Reddy founded the venture. While there is scepticism about whether audiences would pay for catch-up content, Yupp TV has relied on SVOD model for the diaspora and a freemium one in India.
Another OTT platform, Spuul, which also has a large presence outside India, takes the help of popular Bollywood titles to attract them. According to its own viewership statistics, the Indian diaspora has a strong inclination to watch Bollywood movies during leisure time.
On the other hand, a new bunch of players wants to break out of the monotony of catch-up and Bollywood content. Arre, a youth platform launched by ex-TV18 execs B Saikumar and Ajay Chacko, gets a good handful of viewers from abroad for both videos and articles.
“Our show Aisha which is primarily a sci-fi thriller/drama is among the most consumed. It is also one of the most awarded shows from India, internationally. Our other shows like Real High (adventure travel reality), Official Chukiyagiri/ CEOgiri also see a lot of international audiences. We also get a lot of readers on our articles internationally,” Arre co-founder Chacko says.
Chacko feels that the younger audiences want original quality programming of modern India and not the staid staples like Bollywood and catch up.
Holding the same belief, ALTBalaji CMO Manav Sethi feels that content must be unique to get people to pay. “It is very important for today’s consumers who consume content on mobile, paying for data, to watch differentiated things,” he says.
While it comes to market outside India, the US is definitely a promising one, followed by the Gulf countries. For Arre, the US is the largest market outside of India while for ALTBalaji both come in the list of top-five markets. Canada, with a huge number of Punjabi people, is also an attractive market. In fact, on Spuul, other than Hindi content, Punjabi is the highest consumed content.
Depending on the dominant diaspora language in the region, platforms tweak content accordingly. For example, if Canada has more Punjabi people, there will be more Punjabi content for Canada. ALTBalaji released a Tamil show Maya Thirrai, which got traction in Singapore and the UAE, while its Bengali show Dhimaner Dinkaal received got a great response in Bangladesh. Chacko reveals that through YuppTV, Arre gets significant traction for shows, especially the ones dubbed in Telegu among the Indian American diaspora in the east and west coasts of the US.
Two neighbouring countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, also demand Indian content. The similarity in culture, language, dialect, lifestyle and moreover, the pattern of same entertainment content paves the way for OTT players to explore the business there.
These audiences are a good way for OTT players to also get some revenue since most of them only have SVOD or TVOD options. Players say that the diaspora is more likely to pay for content that keeps them connected to their roots. The average revenue per user is higher outside the country. They also have a huge repertoire of choices with good quality in international OTT platforms.
Some platforms want to go beyond the diaspora communities and reach out to other global audiences as well.
“So far, it has been a sustainable model for us, as we have been working on multiple verticals of content but, going forward, we will be paying more attention to India than last year and separate content for specific markets,” Spuul content head Girish Dwibhashyam says.
Due to the diversity of the diaspora, there is no one formula fits all solution. Content creators have to rely on good quality original content to keep these audiences glued.
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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.
