iWorld
‘nexGTv aspires to replicate Netflix’s global success in India:’ GD Singh
MUMBAI: Mobiles and smartphones are no longer about calling and messaging, instead they have manifested as personal lifestyle and attitude statements owing to their growing integration in our lives as engagement and entertainment gadgets.
The discerning, internet savvy generation, especially between 15–35 years, is fast embracing multi-platform media consumption, leading to an increasing demand for anytime, anywhere access to content. They are also the ones who are shaping content viewing decisions including growing relevance of HD, as well as access to exclusive yet vast variety of content.
With aspirations of establishing itself as a digital industry pioneer and India’s biggest subscription-driven video entertainment destination, Digivive Services’ nexGTv plans to strategise itself as per the preferences and behaviour of the consumer.
Speaking to Indiantelevision.com, Digivive Services director and CEO GD Singh says, “With over 27 million profiles, we are best placed to understand, analyse, interpret and create really unique content and flavours for the new-age mobile customer that jack up their entertainment quotient. We initiated creating India’s first ‘mobiserial’ – the first of-its-kind, premium celebrity-led original content for mobile in India, which will elevate the level of programming currently seen in this space.”
Speaking on the content strategy Singh asserts, “While we continue strengthening our leadership in the Live TV space, which is something that our consumers identify and know us for, we are also mining our vast library of data to distil trends and gain insights about consumers’ consumption habits and preferences. User generated and specific community oriented content appears to be the next big consumption driver.”
Digital will be the primary medium through which the venture wants to penetrate itself to the mass. “Like our consumers, our business is primarily digital and so is our marketing. From a customer convenience perspective, we are tightly bundled with all telcos, which saves our consumers needless hassles of re-charging repeatedly,” informs Singh.
nexGTv is exploring alliances and partnerships actively as it is a great way to win new customers as well as friends. Singh further briefs, “We are also debating the need for a physical touchpoint and if necessary, we shall explore new and captivating ways including retail, to make ourselves present in front of our customer.”
The subscription-driven video entertainment destination, follows a ‘freemium’ model, which combines access to both free and paid content. A significant portion of content on nexGTv is available free for viewers and is tagged appropriately. The rest of it, including premium and exclusive content is available only to subscribers, at extremely affordable price points for daily/weekly/monthly viewing. With the rising smartphone penetration and improving network coverage, the entire proposition of mobile entertainment is available to the customer at Rs 125 per month for the choicest, unlimited content.
Speaking on revenue model, Singh explains, “We offer multiple billing options for subscribers including telco-billing, which accounts for a lion’s share of our subscribers, primarily owing to its convenience. However, there also exist additional payment options via Credit and Debit cards as well as wallet integrations including those with PayTM that have been recently added.”
Irrespective of the fact that India’s digital infrastructure is yet to meet the necessary requirements of the OTT ecosystem, a huge number of players are coming into the fray. Foreign players are also making inroads to explore the lucrative Indian market. The number poses threat of the same content – different channels scenario and staying distinguished and ahead of the others will be the key in long run.
“The trick lies in ensuring that as the leader in our category, we remain constantly on our toes, stay engaged with customers and adapt and reinvent ourselves continuously to stay ahead of the curve. Our strategy is to expand our differentiation by being disruptive and one of the fundamental ways of doing that is by producing our very own content and map customer touch-points,” Singh opines.
Advertisers are yet not certain on the reach and visibility of brands when it comes to the digital players and hence the medium is failing to emerge as the primary medium of marketing. “nexGTv’s appeal lies in the universality of its content driven by a consumer base that primarily ranges from 15-35 years. This base is the hotbed of activity for virtually all marquee brands and hence, nexGTv presents itself as an ideal next-generation app or a new generation entertainment platform that appeals to all brands, which are anchoring for a share of the mind and wallet of this segment,” says Singh.
Singh is of the opinion that nexGTv has enough and more content to appeal to consumers of all age-groups (8 – 80 years of age). Throwing light on the target group (TG), he says, “Our biggest consumers are young men and women from 15-35 years, which incidentally is the same age group that is driving the growth of internet in India. While we have a pan-India consumer presence on the app, a substantial percentage of it comes from the top 10 metros and mini-metros.”
“Given the industry we are in and the speed of its evolution, we can never be certain on what’s around the bend? As a young and ambitious company, we aspire to replicate the global success of Netflix in India and our business focus and priorities are aligned to reinforce that objective. Hence, while on the one hand, we’re engaged in transforming ourselves from content aggregators to creators and publishers of original content, on the other, we’re working hard on our UX/UI to facilitate easy discoverability of content on nexGTv. In other developments, while we further fine-tune our customer analytics on one side, we’re also tightening our focus on our content and marketing strategies. Our attempt is to create the future,” concludes Singh.
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.
