iWorld
nexGTv on expansion spree; launches video News app
MUMBAI: While a majority of the broadcasters and media houses are coming up with their standard news applications, one player has taken an unusual path. After rolling a kids app followed by a comedy app, nexGTv, a subscription-led video entertainment app, has announced the launch of its exclusive news app.
Breaking free from the traditional story telling perspective, the app will provide news coverage in audio/visual formats in major Indian languages that include Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, Punjabi, Tamil, etc. The app is open to experiment with more languages.
nexGTv says that the app will provide 360-degree coverage of the latest reports and happenings from across genres like politics, sports, movies, business, lifestyle etc. For starters, the app will curate and enable news content from more than 40 top regional, national and international channels. It will air real time popular shows like Nation at 10, Aaj Tak Live News, India Reports at 10 and News Now at 11, etc, as a part of its Live TV bouquet. The other news offerings such as interviews, Mann Ki Baat and the topical political cartoon humour — So Sorry can also be viewed through VoD.
“We want to explore content which caters better to our consumers through news articles and videos. With creating this app a go-to-go platform for all Indian users across boundaries, we are just exploring news content that often gets buried under GEC news. The niche can relate to this app. We have our own data system in India so I don’t see bandwidth as a major constraint. ,” says nexGTv COO Abhesh Verma.
Following a ‘freemium’ model, most of the news channels are available for free to the end users though there is some content behind the paywall. The news apps has been bundled with nexGTv’s other apps beyond the subscription screen at Rs 35 a week summing to a monthly payment fee of Rs 125.
With timelines crunches, users are often unable to stay updated with the latest information about their areas of interest. To put an end to this, the app will aggregate and deliver video news content from leading TV news channels, revolutionizing through enhanced accessibility, the way news is currently consumed in the country.
Treating people who like staying up-to-date with the latest news and developments from the national and global arena, the app will identify the niches which are undercover right now.
Pointing out the difficulties faced by users in the extremely fragmented viewing experiment, Verma points out how viewers often sit through advertisements, weather reports and repetitive news programmes to consume news. He adds, “This gap in news content delivery and consumption is what we are trying to address with the nexGTv News app. Having been amongst the leading platforms for content aggregation in India, we are now looking to add greater diversity to our news content offerings by partnering with channels that help us cater to our viewers’ specific needs. This will not only boost the quality of our end-user offerings, but will also allow news channels to maximise their consumer outreach through our platform.”
The VOD player is focussed on enabling a holistic and relevant digital news-viewing experience for the end-consumer and adding value through technology. It has integrated several innovative features that augment and enhance the viewer’s browsing experience. While on the one hand non-stop news will be showcased through news bulletins from leading TV news channels under a single tab, VoD news capsules will give users a brief rundown of the top news highlights of the day in just a few minutes.
The resume feature allows viewers to pause live streaming and pick up where they left off, while nexGTv’s Advanced Search with Integrated Electronic Program Guide (EPG) helps browse through genre and language-specific news. Other features, such as Quicky, can find the best news content that fits the time available to users, while the Data Saving Mode assists them in managing their data consumption while streaming videos. This integration of technology results in great value addition for users and allows them to watch news content that suits their viewing preference in a convenient and hassle-free manner claims nexGTv.
“The nexGTv News app leverages state-of-the-art technology to enable features such as VoD news capsules and on-the-go news content. This allows for the delivery of a seamless, on-the-go, and highly relevant 360-degree digital news-viewing experience to our users. With digital video consumption in the country growing in demand, we are confident that the launch of our News app can potentially disrupt the way video news content is viewed in the country,” adds Verma.
Given that the target audience is mass, a smart marketing strategy has been planned to promote the app. While notifications will be sent to their already existing consumer base about the new addition, social media will be used extensively to make the app visible. It will also be promoted through traditional modes of communication.
With more features such as interactive UI, minimised player window, reminders, TV guides and Social Connect on offer, the nexGTv news app is already available on Google Play Store. It has also submitted an application to iOS and is awaiting a confirmation in a couple of days. The player plans to unveil few more apps in the coming days.
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.
