iWorld
QYOU Media India and Bollywood Hungama unite forces
Mumbai: Having recognized the importance of offering diverse and engaging content to its viewers, QYOU Media India, in an endeavor to further strengthen its presence in the Connected TV space, announces that it has entered a partnership with Bollywood Hungama to launch a new Connected TV channel in Q4 of 2023 called BH Live TV Powered by QYOU Media. The new channel marks the addition of Bollywood content to QYOU Media India’s multi-genre FAST channels content library. Combining the power of both companies in the world of social media with the long-standing status of Bollywood Hungama as the world’s most widely visited Bollywood portal, the channel will feature all news and gossip surrounding the world of Bollywood and the Indian entertainment business.
BH Live TV Powered by QYOU Media will be exclusively available on the Q Play+ app along with leading Connected TV platforms including Samsung TV Plus, Amazon Fire TV, Xiaomi, TCL, One Plus, and other Connected TV (CTV) brands. The addition of this new channel strengthens the network’s growing list of channels in the emerging FAST (Free Ad Supported TV) channel ecosystem, marking a significant milestone for QYOU Media India, as it bolsters its commitment to delivering top-quality, entertaining content to its diverse and ever-growing audience base.
The driving impetus for the partnership is the explosive growth of the global CTV (Smart TV) industry which has also begun to expand its impact in India in recent years. The India CTV (Smart TV) market has tripled in size in the last 18 months with homes using CTV expected to grow to 60 million by 2025. While still relatively nascent in India in terms of television ad spend, the CTV industry globally is now responsible for generating $25.9 billion in ad revenue in 2023 according to Group M’s midyear forecast. With the introduction across CTV platforms of AI-driven recommendation engines, Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), and overall data-fueled TV performance, the CTV industry is expected to dominate television viewership and ad revenue growth going forward. In the last year, over 90% of all televisions sold in the country of India were Smart TVs.
Speaking on the launch of BH Live TV Powered by QYOU Media, QYOU Media India COO Krishna Menon said, “In an era where Connected TV is becoming an integral part of entertainment, we at QYOU Media India, continue to recognize the importance of innovation in the FAST category. We aim to curate channels that cater to the varied interests of our audiences, and the collaboration with Bollywood Hungama is a fantastic addition to our portfolio. With this new channel, we aim to further solidify our position in the CTV space and continue providing unparalleled entertainment experiences.”
Hungama Digital Entertainment CEO Siddhartha Roy remarked on the partnership, “This partnership of Bollywood Hungama and QYOU Media is poised to introduce an exciting new dimension of entertainment for viewers. In today’s landscape, where Connected TV is a vital part of the experience, we recognize the need for innovation in the FAST category. Our goal is to curate channels that cater to our viewers’ diverse interests, and this collaboration is a significant addition to our content offerings. We look forward to strengthening our presence in this arena and providing our audience with exceptional content tailored to their preferences.”
With this latest addition, QYOU Media India strengthens its position as a leading player in the Connected TV space, offering viewers a diverse range of premium content across multiple genres.
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.
