iWorld
Lionsgate Play exclusively streamed the 81 Golden Globe Awards on 8 January
Mumbai: The awaited night in cinematic television reigned supreme! The 81 Golden Globe Awards are here. Showcasing entertainment brilliance, the star-studded event celebrated awards, heartfelt speeches, glamor, and fashion trends, bringing all your favourite Hollywood stars under the same roof! Be it Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan’s first ever Golden Globe win or the unexpected but extremely welcome Suits reunion, the Awards were a perfect start to the year. This cultural celebration where the red-carpet met the alchemy of storytelling streamed LIVE today on Lionsgate Play on 8 January 2024. In case you missed it, the 81 Golden Globe Awards are available to watch, exclusively on the platform. Here’s taking a quick look at the best moments from the 81 Golden Globes.
The Taylena Reunion of our dreams
Mothers have mothered and how! The most celebrated Hollywood duo aka Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez, gave their fans yet another ‘awww’ worthy moment as they posed for some adorable selfies. What’s more, the two were seen engaging in a serious gossip session, which had us all wondering what ‘tea’ was being spilled. Rumor has it that a certain Jenner stopped Sel from posing with Willy Wonka aka Timothee Chalamet. We’d love to know how that unfolded.
Unmatched Oppenheimer Dominance
With his chiselled jawline and iconically rare smile, Robert J Oppenheimer aka Cillian Murphy came in and stole the show as Oppenheimer swept the scene with 5 wins in various categories. From Murphy’s and Christopher Nolan’s first ever Golden Globe Win as Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture and Best Director of a Motion Picture to Best Motion Picture, the film dominated the Awards night. Ruling theatres in 2023 by garnering more than 1 BILLION in revenue, the actor-director duo reigned supreme, proving that they are here to stay!
Michelle Yeoh’s not-so-subtle warning
She’s a Crazy Rich Asian and knows how to get away with it! After winning Best Actor Female in a Motion Picture during the 2023 Golden Globe Awards for ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’, Michelle Yeoh was forced to wrap up her speech by an impatient pianist, leading to her viral ‘shut up’ moment. However, this time around, when the actor came to present the award she gave a not-so-subtle nod stating ‘I threatened to beat up the piano player if they played me off my acceptance speech. You will be happy to know that I am very chill this year’, leaving the audience in hoots.
Barbie took the Cinematic Box Office cake and a few other slices too!
After painting the town pink, Barbie not only got nominated in a brand new category, but won it too. To celebrate theatre and movie-goers, the Golden Globes introduced the ‘Cinematic and Box Office Achievement’ category. With films like John Wick: Chapter 4, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 and Oppenheimer fighting to take the gold home, Barbie still landed on top, proving that womanhood rules. Besides its triumphant win in the category, the Margot Robbie starrer also took home best Original Song in a Motion Picture for Billie Eilish’s ‘What Was I Made For?’
A Well ‘Suited’ Reunion
Butch and Sundance are back, baby! A surprise reunion saw the main cast of Suits reunite on-screen (albeit just to present an award). Despite missing a few key members of the cast, Patrik Adams, Gabrial Macht, Gina Torres and Sarah Rafferty reunited to present the award for Best Television Series, giving fans the same excitement and happiness they did for 9 years. With their witty banter still intact, they showed viewers and fans that they haven’t skipped a beat after all these years.
Lionsgate Play exclusively streamed the 81st Golden Globe Awards on 8 January 2023 at 6:30 AM
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.
