iWorld
Neestream bets big on Malayali diaspora
MUMBAI: Neestream, a streaming platform targeted at the Malayalam-speaking population across the globe, was launched earlier this month. The premium service is limited to the US and Canada, with a basic version available in Kerala. But it will soon be available across the world. The OTT platform seeks to reach the Malayali diaspora across the world. It hopes to accomplish that by the end of 2021, says Neestream Chairman Dr Javad K Hassan during an interaction with Indiantelevision.com.
Neestream, owned by Virginia-based conglomerate JKH Holding Co, bets big on the Malayalam-speaking diaspora spread all over the world. According to the chairman, as much as 20 per cent of the Malayali population lives outside of Kerala, which is a captive market that can be tapped. “Apart from an occasional movie based on an NRI in the United States or Gulf, there is not enough content on this important demography. We want to address that,” he says.
Going forward, it plans to launch more regional OTT platforms. Asked when the full version will be made available, Javad said, “We hope to make that call in the near future. Right now, because of Covid-19, our expansion plans are on hold. Our basic package is available in Kerala and other parts of the world.”
In a market flooded with OTT platforms of various kinds, what prompted it to launch a Malayalam streaming service? “A lot of factors were instrumental in us focusing on Malayalam,” he says. “The Indian OTT market is very crowded, with the presence of major international players such as Netflix and Amazon, and Indian heavyweights such as Hotstar. Many of these companies already have presence in the Malayalam market, but only in a limited way. While all these streaming services have solid Malayalam content, their primary focus is elsewhere.”
“Kerala has a huge diaspora, which, our studies have shown, consumes a lot of Malayalam news and entertainment content on a regular basis. It’s also a market very familiar to us, with most of our leadership having close ties to Kerala. In fact, our technology base is in Kochi, the commercial capital of Kerala,” he adds.
The company has ambitious future plans in the streaming segment. They include plans to launch similar streaming services in other regional languages.
“We do have long-term plans to enter other regional languages, but not at this point. Right now, our focus is to grow Neestream in the North American market and then globally,” he informed.
The future plans include platforms focused on current affairs. In the second half of the year, it will be launching a companion current affairs platform in English, targeting the Indian diaspora in North America. Another platform for the global Indian diaspora is also in the pipeline. Both will be more current affairs-heavy than news and entertainment.
With regard to the sourcing of content, Neestream has a multipronged approach for sourcing content. “We have acquired a lot of third-party content and are still doing it. We have also launched a modest production setup, which we plan to grow gradually. In the long run, we will also focus on unearthing talent and creators in Kerala and from within the global Malayalee diaspora.”
Neestream has a number of shows in the pipeline, including a lot of content on and from the diaspora.
Neestream follows a mixed content strategy, comprising a mixed bag of original and the old evergreen content. “It is a mix of originals and existing content. The experiences of all OTT players show that while originals are the key to the kingdom, evergreen content from the past is also very popular among viewers. We will be acquiring a fair deal of existing content. At the moment, we are in talks with a number of producers and content creators in Malayalam,” he explains.
The streaming platform has adopted a robust marketing plan, combining both offline and online campaigns. “We are also planning a number of events, including concerts and entertainment events, as part of our marketing campaign. At the moment, most of the offline campaigns are halted as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown. But we are continuing online campaigns, which are delivering great results,” he says.
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.
