iWorld
Prime Video announces immersive & localised cricket experience for Ind vs. NZ series from 18 Nov
Mumbai: Streaming service, Prime Video, amps up the excitement around the Indian cricket team’s tour of New Zealand beginning 18 November, with a series of announcements. In a first for Prime Video India, the service will show advertisements during live cricket matches. It has signed up Airtel Xstream Fiber as the presenting sponsor, and MPL, Nescafé, Noise, OLX Autos, and Vida have come on board as associate sponsors. Meanwhile, brands including AMFI and DBS join as advertisers.
This move will help brands reach Prime Video’s premium base of highly engaged customers spread across the country.
India and New Zealand both reached the semi-finals of the Twenty20 World Cup in Australia but lost their matches. They will now play a limited-overs series consisting of three T20s and three ODIs between 18 and 30 November. Prime Video is the official India territory rights holder to exclusively stream all men’s and women’s cricket matches played in New Zealand.
Prime Video India director of SVoD business Sushant Sreeram said, “There are many things that are heterogeneous about the delightfully diverse India when it comes to entertainment—be it choice of language, genres of shows and movies, devices that customers prefer watching their favourite entertainment on, and so much more. But there is one absolute unifier that everyone across the country is unanimously passionate about, and that’s cricket! With our slate of compelling shows and movies over the last six years, we have strived to super-serve our customers, and they have emphatically picked Prime Video as their most loved entertainment destination. Now, with live cricket made immersive and accessible through multi-language feeds, fantastic studio programming, and a superb set of commentators to guide us through the series, we are confident that we will not only deliver a superior experience for the country’s legions of cricket fans, but also make Prime Video the first choice of entertainment for everyone.”
“India and New Zealand have both been at the top of their white ball games in the recent past, and we expect some explosive cricket in the coming weeks from two of the best teams in the world as the cricketing action now moves from Australia to New Zealand,” he added.
Prime Video will deliver live commentary and match-programming in English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu. Fans will also be treated to graphics in these languages. Former captains and cricketers like Ravi Shastri, Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra, Gundappa Viswanath, Anjum Chopra, and Venkatpathy Raju, among others, will be bringing the matches alive with their insightful commentary in different languages as India tries to set the record straight against New Zealand. The BlackCaps knocked the Men in Blue out of the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup and also defeated India in the inaugural World Test Championship final in 2021.
The full slate of commentators for the series includes the following names:
English: Ravi Shastri, Harsha Bhogle, Anjum Chopra, Simon Doull, and Murali Kartik. Gaurav Kapoor will be the presenter.
Hindi: Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra, Ajay Jadeja, Mohammad Kaif, and Ajit Agarkar.
Tamil: WV Raman, Hemang Badani, L Sivaramakrishnan, and S Sriram.
Kannada: Gundappa Viswanath, Veda Krishnamurthy, Shankar Prakash, Venkatesh Prasad, and K Jeshwant.
Telugu: Venkatpathy Raju, Sunitha Anand, Sudhir Malwvedi, and Vijay Malwvedi.
The cricket experience for the fans doesn’t stop here. Prime Video will also offer an English-language live one-hour pre-show before each game. The mid-innings break will feature a 15-minute show that will be a recap of the first inning and a preview of the second. The live programming also involves a 30-minute post-match presentation and analysis by Prime Video’s stable of cricket experts.
Curating a new viewing experience for live sports, Prime Video will offer customers new features like an in-game language selector and “Rapid Recap.” The in-game language selector will allow customers to change languages (e.g., from English to Hindi) seamlessly without exiting the player. Customers joining a game in progress can catch-up on impactful game highlights using the “Rapid Recap” feature before transitioning to the live stream automatically.
To watch the matches, consumers can go to the Prime Video app on their respective devices, where they will be able to find the live match featured on the home page. On Android and Smart TV devices, they can select the Cricket tab in the top navigation. The Cricket section’s landing page will include live matches as well as full replays of previous matches. Consumers can choose a language stream of their choice to enjoy the match. The page will also feature the key highlights of the matches—Super Sixes and short highlights—for a quick catch-up. Fans can stream these matches online through their web browser, mobile devices, internet-connected TVs, set-top boxes, Fire TV sticks, and other compatible devices.
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.
