iWorld
Pleased with India progress, says Netflix’s Reed Hastings
MUMBAI: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings today announced that he was pleased with the progress his streaming powerhouse was making in India. Speaking to Sanford C Bernstein senior research analyst Todd Michael Juenger during a Q4 2017 earnings interview, Hastings said, “We are very pleased with the progress that we’re making in India, throughout Southeast Asia and Japan. So, really, all across the board, we’re seeing growth penetrations that look like the first couple of years of Latin America, which, as you know, has worked out very well for us.”
Estimates are that Netflix has anywhere between 700,000 to a million paying subs in India. At that level–with the average subscription being Rs 600–the streaming giant is currently turning over anywhere between Rs 42 crore and Rs 60 crore a month, giving it annual revenue of Rs 504 crore to Rs 720 crore. As compared to that, estimates are that Star Plus alone tots up Rs 2,100 crore in revenue.
“That’s pretty good going for such a new service,” says a media observer. “You can’t forget that it is an international service offering with very limited localisation so far.”
The company announced that it had registered net global additions of 8.3 million–the highest quarter growth numbers in its history, up 18 per cent compared to 2016’s high of 7.05 million net adds. Netflix’s average paid streaming memberships rose by 25 per cent year on year in Q4. Combined with a 9 per cent increase in ASP, global streaming revenue growth amounted to 35 per cent. Operating income of $245 million (7.5 per cent margin) vis-a-vis $154 million in the prior year (6.2 per cent margin) was slightly above the firm’s $238 million forecast. Operating margin for FY17 was 7.2 per cent, on target with the firm’s goal at the beginning of this year.
Internationally, Netflix added 6.36 million memberships (compared with the firm’s earlier guidance of 5.05 million), a new record for quarterly net adds for this segment. Excluding a foreign impact of more than $43 million, international revenue and ASP grew by 59 per cent and 12 per cent year over year, respectively. The increase in ASP reflects price adjustments in a wide variety of Netflix’s markets over the course of 2017. With contribution profit of $227 million in 2017 (4.5 per cent contribution margin), the international segment delivered its first full year of positive contribution profit in the firm’s history.
For Q1, the firm has projected global net adds of 6.35 million (against 5.0 million in the year ago quarter) with 1.45 million in the US and 4.90 million internationally. On the whole, the company has upped its content budget to $7.5-$8 billion for 2018.
Its original content slate from India should start rolling out sometime later this year. In the earnings press release, the company said, “We’re finding continued success with international originals. High-quality content can travel globally, irrespective of language…we will expand this initiative with over 30 international original series this year, including projects from France, Poland, India, Korea and Japan.”
In India, the firm has been striking partnerships with platforms such as Videocon d2h and Airtel wherein the Netflix app has been embedded in an easy-to-view user interface. It has been extending this partnership to cable TV MSOs. Said the company: “We are partnering with a growing number of MVPDs and ISPs across the world to the benefit of our mutual customers. These partnerships make it easier for consumers to sign up, enjoy and pay for Netflix while our service allows our partners to deepen their relationships with these subscribers. “
Hastings revealed that he did not expect Disney’s proposed acquisition of Fox’s India assets, including Hotstar, to impact it any differently than it used to in the past year. “Not particularly. I mean, YouTube gets the most streaming in India, but Hotstar gets the second most. So it’s not a wildly different landscape. So that wouldn’t particularly change our view in India. Hotstar’s a great competitor, and sometimes collaborator now, and I’m sure they would continue to be under Disney,” he said.
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.
