eNews
New tensports.com sees spike in viewership
MUMBAI: Launched in June last year, Star India’s digital sports offering – starsports.com – has since created a lot of traction among sports enthusiasts in the country. And the same can be said for Ten Sports’ website – tensports.com – that was re-launched not too long ago on 27 March and has since witnessed a spike in viewership.
“A lot of research, thought and hard work has gone into the re-launch of tensports.com; we are aware of the opportunities in the digital space and want to really cash in on it,” reveals Ten Sports CEO Rajesh Sethi. “We are very focussed on getting the best coverage and updates to sports fans through tensports.com and going forward, we will only get deeper into the space.”
To its credit, the revisited site is a definite improvement over its predecessor with various well-placed sections that are easy to navigate. Apart from separate tabs for sports like cricket, football, tennis, golf and WWE, a section has been demarcated for blogs, videos and the TV guide.
“Not many know this fact, but the TV guide is something which receives the most visits during the day. It serves as the destination for all sports fans to keep track of various events or matches that are scheduled for the day,” says Sethi.
It was after more than five months of beta testing that the overhauled site went live on 27 March. As of now, content generated is both in-house and from blogs but going forward; the plan is to have more in-house content.
“The digital, content and marketing teams all got together to really push for the re-launch and I am really pleased with the results,” says Sethi. “We also want to create a lot of social traction and thus, have aligned our social media on the portal as well, and are confident that we will only grow from strength to strength.”
Since going live, tensports.com has witnessed an increase in viewership. To delve into numbers, the portal gets about 1.6 million visitors per month, of which, 0.7 million are unique visitors. Breaking this down further, 0.42 million come from mobile and 0.28 million come from desktops. The new site has been designed to be very responsive and can easily adapt to various screens including desktops, mobiles, tablets etc.
“This move has encouraged consumption on multiple screens and it reflects in our viewership as well. After the re-launch, the bounce rate on mobiles has reduced by 11 per cent and that of desktops by 27 per cent,” says Sethi, adding, “Social media is a very important tool for us, and we will leverage the platform to drive our fans to the website.” For the record, tensports.com has over 2.5 million likes on Facebook and 73,100 followers on Twitter.
Plans are afoot to hold Google Hangout sessions with sports fans to keep up the engagement levels. Significantly, the Ten Sports’ sports calendar is a healthy mix of various sports, with big-ticket events like the Hockey World Cup, Asian Games and Commonwealth Games; it could be slated to be streamed live on the website along with being telecast on the channel.
“We are yet to try out live beaming of an event, but I am confident of our ability to bring high quality video content to the fans with such important events coming up,” says Sethi. Asked about the business model, he does not reveal much except that the site plans on adopting a mix of ad and subscription revenues.
With competition among sports broadcasters hotting up, viewers can only expect bigger and better sports entertainment lined up for them.
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
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.
