iWorld
Kapil Sharma goes beyond the screen to surprise fan!
Mumbai – The Great Indian Kapil Show which launched on 30 March has been the talk of the town since the first announcement dropped by Netflix last year. Three weeks in a row, the show has been trending in the Global Top 10 List – Netflix’s weekly Top 10 lists of the most-watched TV and films. For the first time ever, Netflix in partnership with ACT Fibernet, has done something unique and clutter breaking delighting fans across the country! Through this partnership, Kapil Sharma,
Sunil Grover and Krushna Abhishek surprised fans by traveling all the way to their respective cities, knocking on their doors and waltzing into their homes & hearts leaving their neighbors green with envy.
The emotions went from surprise to delight to in a matter of seconds as Kapil, Sunil and Krushna went knocking on people’s doors. From squeals of “Oh My God, I can’t believe it” to “Agli baar bhabhi aur bacchon ko lekar aana” there was a whole lot of love and ‘apnapan’ showered on Kapil & the team. Elderly couples to young adults and kids, all queued up and patiently waited for a glimpse of their favourite artists from balconies and windows – cheering for them, as they walked around the neighborhood soaking in all the smiles with only and only gratitude in their hearts.
Sharma shared, “When I first heard this idea from Netflix, I absolutely loved it. No further questions asked. I have always talked about the deepest gratitude and regard I hold for my fans and to be able to meet them in person, in their homes, and share a moment with them, is a priceless experience for me. It almost felt like meeting my extended family. I am glad we could do this. It feels surreal when you get treated so warmly by fans and you are privy to their genuine feelings so up close and personal.”
Grover further added, “The expression on people’s faces – the surprise, delight and warmth just touched my heart. I am falling short of words to express myself. I am touched by the amount of love people showered on us. This whole experience has engraved itself in my core memory. I can’t stop smiling as I say this.”
Abhishek shared, “Getting an opportunity to be treated not like a guest but like family in the homes of our amazing fans was deeply moving. It has reinstated that we are on the right track and it only motivates us to keep working harder. It absolutely felt great to personally visit societies and homes –
where people knew so much about us. They asked us so caringly about our family and kids. To know that people are enjoying the episodes with family saying they have a reason to watch something so wholesome together is reassuring and I would like to congratulate Netflix for bringing us together.”
Talking about the surprise visits organized by ACT Fibernet and Netflix, ACT Fibernet CMO Ravi Karthik said, “This unique collaboration between ACT Fibernet and Netflix has brought the magic of entertainment directly into the homes of subscribers. It also showcases the power of laughter to unite communities. Kapil, Sunil and Krushna are household names, known and loved for their TV appearances for years. With their new show – The Great Indian Kapil Show on Netflix, we saw this as an opportunity to provide our subscribers with an advantage and organized these surprise visits. By bridging the virtual and real worlds, ACT Fibernet and Netflix reaffirm their commitment to enhancing the customer experience while spreading joy through laughter.”
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.
