iWorld
Reclaiming bold – Why Indian entertainment must dare again: Alok Jain, JioStar
MUMBAI: The 9th Content Hub Summit 2025 opened with momentum, bringing together leaders from across the entertainment landscape to explore what’s driving the industry forward. From the surge in local content and continued growth of television, to the rise of the creator economy and the growing influence of AI in storytelling, the discussions reflected a fast-evolving and opportunity-rich ecosystem.
In a keynote address that surely stirred the chai, Alok Jain from JioStar insisted that the only path forward is to be bold. First up, challenging the industry’s penchant for playing it safe. “We have mistakenly assumed that the only way of making great content in the future is by following what has worked in the past.” While acknowledging the relevance of history, Jain stressed that in this industry, “the past will not always define the future.” Bold content needs a “big leap of faith”. Every time the industry has seen great stories emerge across TV, digital or movies, it’s been because we dared to reimagine.
Jain didn’t mince words, highlighting several hurdles stifling the industry’s boldness. The “I am the world” phenomenon. One of the most powerful moments in the keynote was Jain’s critique of creative myopia – he cited Ormax, which notes a staggering 49 per cent of OTT content is based in Delhi and Mumbai. “We all think our immediate surroundings, our friends, our family – is the entire world.. but that’s not true,” Jain said, urging content creators to look beyond their metropolitan bubbles. He painted a vibrant picture of a nation of 1.4 billion people, 60 per cent of whom are under 35 years, highlighting unparalleled diversity across states, territories, languages, and dialects – insisting that this “scale along with diversity is our true strength.”
Jain touched upon access for emerging talent being restricted, with systemic walls blocking their entry—an issue that urgently needs to be addressed. He says, “it is extremely difficult for anyone new with a creative voice to come and pitch a great piece of content.” In an age where technology has democratized content creation and “every consumer is also… a creator,” such barriers are not just outdated, but detrimental. If we don’t actively dismantle these walls, we risk missing out on the next generation of storytellers who are already shaping culture from the margins.
Jain critiqued the industry’s habit of asking “what have you done before?” when new talent approaches them. He advocated for “betting more on the potential the person can have,” even if it’s a riskier approach. He highlighted successes like Taaza Khabar which was Bhuvan Bam’s first OTT show, Thukra Ke Mera Pyaar helmed by new makers and a fresh cast, and 4 successful seasons of MTV Hustle as examples of fostering new talent.
And then there’s the elephant in the room: Economics. “As an industry we tend to believe that big means big budget only,” Jain lamented. He delivered a line that truly hit home: “Not everything that costs a lot is worth a lot.”
Despite these headwinds, Jain expressed bullish optimism about India’s potential. Our digital prowess is undeniable – the largest e-commerce market, ubiquitous UPI transactions, and a thriving startup ecosystem with a plethora of unicorns. And entertainment leads the charge of this growth story : the largest TV viewer base globally, highest movie production, and half a billion streaming users. With 200,000 hours of professionally generated content annually, India is a “creative powerhouse.” And we are only getting started, there is “significant headroom for growth to be achieved across TV (70% penetration), Movies (Only 1 theater for every 140,000 people) and Digital (65% internet penetration). What’s truly remarkable about India is that no single medium is growing at the cost of another; instead, all are evolving and thriving side by side, creating a uniquely dynamic media landscape.”
In fact, Jain directly challenged two prevailing industry myths: “No one watches TV anymore”, and “theatres are dead.”
“Around 850 million viewers tune into linear TV every month, and watch ~3 hours of content daily – which is almost 4 times greater than average OTT consumption. 190,000 hours out of 200,000 of original content created in India is made for TV and it continues to be the bedrock of the entertainment landscape in India.” Citing BARC data, he pointed out that TV viewership has remained steady for the last 17 years. “TV is not dying,” he declared, urging the audience to look beyond their “I am the world” bubble.
Similarly, for cinema, he spoke about recent examples like Saiyaara and Chhaava, proving that “if we make great content, people will come to the theatres.”
JioStar, as India’s largest broadcaster, digital platform, and content studio, is taking on the mantle of being bold in form and voice. The company’s success stories demonstrate their commitment to understanding and serving diverse consumer needs – with shows like Anupamaa (unshackling from patriarchy), Taali, Shakti – Astitva Ke Ehsaas Ki (LGBTQ+ themes) and the enduring popularity of MTV Roadies, which just concluded its 20th season, constantly innovating and staying close to its audience.
Acknowledging that consumers are screen-agnostic, moving seamlessly between TV, digital, and cinema, JioStar is backing bold formats across all mediums. Their show Laughter Chefs is a prime example, topping viewership charts on both television and JioHotstar.
Jain concluded with a clarion call for the Indian entertainment industry: “The world is watching India, and we must give them more than just the volume. Need of the hour is innovation across the entire value chain, from understanding consumers and crafting compelling stories to smart budgeting, production, marketing, and embracing technology like Gen AI.
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.
