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Khul Ke to reshape content era with D2M technology
Mumbai: Aligning with the vision of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India, Khul Ke, a leading platform for purposeful content, has integrated with D2M technology. The company’s decision to join the D2M league stems from the excitement of establishing a direct relationship between the platform and its users, bypassing the traditional reliance on the internet. The integration presents the opportunity to bridge the gap between urban and rural areas, enabling users in remote locations to access purposeful content.
With millions of D2M-enabled devices expected over the next one to two years, Khul Ke’s purposeful content across education, health, science and technology, sports, business, governance, and entertainment stands to benefit immensely from this expanded reach. Users will be able to access Khul Ke’s live talks, roundtable discussions, upskilling courses, and other rich content regardless of connectivity barriers.
D2M, a new-age technology amalgamating broadband and broadcast, utilizes mobile phones to capture territorial digital TV signals. The result is a seamless streaming experience for multimedia content, including live TV matches, directly to phones without the need for an internet connection.
D2M Broadcast Project Advisor Nandita Bakshi participated in a roundtable hosted by Khul Ke on the D2M Bharat Tech Moment. During the conversation, she emphasized and brought attention that “D2M is a first-of-its-kind, pathbreaking technology wholly conceived and developed in India – an indigenous chipset that can now connect mobiles directly via terrestrial broadcasting signals without the need for internet connectivity. This unprecedented innovation promises to be an empowering force that touches citizens across regions and socioeconomic strata, taking multimedia content and upskilling opportunities to remote areas and young aspirational populations alike. By informing, educating, and energizing the grassroots, I believe D2M will be instrumental in building an employed, skilled workforce that powers India’s continued rise.”
Khul Ke founder & CEO Piyush Kulshreshtha said, “Our commitment to advancing technological innovation for nationwide access to purposeful content takes a significant leap forward with our integration into India’s groundbreaking D2M platform. This integration represents a pivotal chapter in our mission, enabling us to utilize targeted broadcasting and deliver engaging multimedia content in real time to millions across diverse urban and rural landscapes. Aligning seamlessly with the vocal for local ethos, this alliance showcases the power of homegrown technology to drive progress. We are very excited about this Bharat Tech Moment and are honored to leverage D2M’s potential in bridging the digital divide, reaching deep into grassroots communities to stimulate learning, discussions, and upskilling at a scale that uplifts. We anticipate this new broadcasting capability to usher in an era of active participation and personalized user experiences, setting a precedent for unprecedented connectivity and engagement.”
Kulshreshtha attended the “Driving India’s Techade-D2M for Bharat – 5G Broadcast Summit,” a pivotal event organized by IIT Kanpur and Saankhya Labs on January 16, 2024, at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. The summit served as a platform to discuss concrete strategies and actions to propel Direct-to-Mobile (D2M) broadcasting into the spotlight as a transformative force in the mobile broadcasting arena.
D2M technology has extensive applications, offering direct and reliable emergency alerts independently of internet or cellular networks. It excels in disaster management by delivering targeted authentic audio content. Its terrestrial fallback feature serves as a crucial contingency for broadcasting strategic public content in the event of satellite failures. Additionally, D2M optimizes resource use by converging radio services onto a shared broadcast infrastructure, conserving spectrum, land, manpower, and public resources. This highlights D2M’s vital role in meeting communication needs and maximizing resource efficiency.
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.
