iWorld
OTT platforms chasing the regional pie
MUMBAI: It isn't just the broadcast sector that's woken up to the call of the regional, but even the budding over the top (OTT) platforms.
On the stage of Vidnet 2018, hosted by Indiantelevision.com, experts from India’s leading OTT platforms were present. Voot Originals head and VP Viacom Tanya Bami, Eros Now VP editorial and content strategy Piyush Bhatia, monozygotic CEO Ravi Luthria, Arre Sharan Budraja and Spuul content head Girish Dwibhashyam shared their views on the state of content on OTT. The panel was moderated by Monozygotic founder Rajiv Laxman.
Dwibhashyam highlighted about Spuul’s SVOD format and said that initially its primary focus was largely outside India but over a period of time, it captured users in India as well. According to him, currently, long form and live television are more suited for SVOD and for short form content which is less than 10 minutes, AVOD is the way to go. He added, “Earlier, viewership used to come from Mumbai, Delhi metro belt but in the last 9-10 months the consumption has started coming in from the small towns for regional languages like Bhojpuri, Punjabi and that is the trend that we are observing these days. So our focus in India will be more in vernacular languages as we believe that the next 400 million internet users will be different from people right now and they will largely speak vernacular language and would want to watch the content in their own language rather than English language.”
Bami agreed to Dwibhashyam's point about Indian audiences getting inclined towards regional content. She said, “Half of the population is supposed to parallelly grow by 23 per cent in the next couple of years. So, those are people moving away from TV and if they were to watch TV, they will be already on Voot.” Furthermore, according to her, people are moving away from conventional mainstream content and are looking at the international channels and OTT platforms and those are the stories that are offered in regional languages which will gain traction from the viewers. “So the attempt is to move into pure-play storytelling and that will attract newer audiences to the ones who are digital natives. So to top-up the footfall that we may have is why we would go SVOD. Each show will attract the audiences like we did a very big experiment with a popular show on MTV, Kaisi ye Yaariyan, by bringing it on Voot.”
Throwing light on the original content on the platforms, Bami said that serving original content is a must, but content strategy is also important. She said that the platform will be able to maximise and juice it up around content like extra dose, or behind the scenes or probably any sort of engaging content to the audiences will attract eyeballs. She explained by giving an example of Bigg Boss’s content strategy on Voot with Video Vichaar.
Commenting on the same, Bhatia also added that original content is everyone’s primary focus on every OTT platform. While Luthria said the industry should get into more collaborations and developing content base because that will drive the industry. “Three years down the line you see the problem coming in that there are so many things happening. Also, if you are saying that there is no consolidation, then there will be more disruptive content because everyone will be running behind the same pie. So, I suggest there should be collaborative, creative content development.”
Dwibhashyam concluded by saying that the Bible for content for OTT will be the internal consumption dashboard. “I think the future is going to be where we have seen it with Netflix or Amazon that how they used their internal data, that every platform today knows what content is actually getting consumed and what type of content works basically and in future consumers are going to see the stuff that they would like to watch.”
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.
