iWorld
KidzByte launches India’s first app-based kids news channel
MUMBAI: There is no dearth of education-related apps. Now, here comes one app which gives an opportunity to schoolchildren to become news anchors.
KidzByte TV, which has its tagline as 'By kids', enables children to read out news on varied topics.
KidzByte has now rolled out the new video section, besides reading and read-to-me categories. “The aim is to lure the school students between 8-17 years old to get a habit of reading and growing with the general knowledge-based news”, says the founder of the KidzByte MediaTech founder Chetan D’Souza.
D’Souza, a marketing professional, launched KidzByte, a news, knowledge, and fun mobile application, in 2018 along with Swagat Salunke. The application covers 17 different topics such as India and world, science and discovery, earth and environment, sports and games among others.
The application is already on Google play store with over 50,000 downloads and 4.2 stars rating. The platform has onboard five students from Mumbai schools between 9-16 age groups to be the news presenter of the channel. It also has at least 100 quality contributors, whose articles, paintings and poems get featured on the platform.
“KidzByte is the first Indian app that takes care of kids’ non-academic needs. It recently unveiled its new avatar and added multiple offerings to its core app to provide kids with a dynamic user experience,” says D’Souza.
The selection of these five news anchors was done by contest; the platform ran across premium schools in tier-one cities. The five news anchors are Vivaan Goel (11), Shaunak Kanavia (9), Dania Mascarenhas (9), Joanne Joseph (14) and Shawna Mascarenhas (15).
Through seed funding, the founders have successfully raised 2 crores in 2019 from the Goyal group of companies managing director Pranay Goyal. “The two major reasons I invested in this project: The initiative is unique as it doesn’t have much clutter and the belief in Chetan and his passion for the application as he has a lot of potential for getting things done to final results", says Goyal.
Goyal, commenting on the return of investment, says: “More than business, the moral responsibility is important, however, more and more viewers are being attracted to the platform. Moreover, the targets are being achieved before the timeline as model progress believe returns will come back earlier than what was projected by the KidzByte team.”
“There are only three stakeholders in the KidzByte. The founders being majority stakeholder, Goyal holds minority shareholder position in the company,” says D’Souza.
The platform has also roped in sponsors such as FMCG product Unibic Cookies, a stationery product BioQ and the healthy biscuit product the Growing Giraffe among others. The KidzByte CEO says, “We are against showing the advertisement between the news pieces, however, there will be branded content and brand integration of the sponsors during the news broadcast.”
In terms of revenue, the platform will have a subscription-based model with a charge of Rs 1200/year with 8-10 articles and news broadcast being published on the platform. Moreover, to lure more kids and parents on the platform it has also kept a non-subscription module with four stories per day for kids.
The platform plans to market itself through word of mouth method by reaching to the kids and their parents who are already benefitted by this application. It also mulls to do the on-ground initiative to hold seminars in schools and institutions with parents and teachers to make them aware of the app.
On the future goal of the platform, D’Soua says, “Aim to turn the channel into an over-the-top OTT platform and to get it hosted on its server soon. We also wish to make kids aware of fake news concepts, teach them about online safety and cyberbullying, and eventually give them career guidance”.
“Our next immediate goal is to tap the 25,000 ICSE and CBSE schools located in Mumbai, which is a total of at least 3 crore students within the age group of 8-17 years. However, the larger goal is to reach every kid in the country irrespective of the background and school”, concludes the D’Souza.
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.
