iWorld
Showt empowers the common person to voice their opinion: Anshuman Misra
NEW DELHI: Showt, an instant global voting platform scheduled to have its global launch in Q1 2021, recently roped in Anshuman Misra as the president.
He will be playing an instrumental role in scaling the platform and his vision is to reach everyone with a mobile phone in India, followed by the world.
Misra was last serving at Hike as VP operations (product, growth, and engineering). He worked there for over eight years. He has an overall experience of 17 years in deep tech and has led various positions at Hike, Spice Digital, IBM, and Microsoft. He has a proven ability to drive strategic growth in digital consumer products through product innovation, NLP and AI.
The Showt platform allows people everywhere, across all devices, the opportunity to quickly express and share a positive or negative opinion about public figures, brands, organizations, music, film, television, and have their opinions be aggregated, replied to, and reported on worldwide.
Headquartered in Dublin, Showt is a powerful new way for brands to connect with their consumers, for stars to connect with their fans, for politicians to connect with their voters. The platform is accessible in 65 languages.
Indiantelevision.com caught up with Misra to know about his plans and how he intends to take the platform forward.
Q: How did you get recruited to Showt?
Well, it was a serendipitous meeting with Michael and Andy. I was definitely blown away by the sheer potential of the idea and also pleasantly surprised that this space hasn’t been aggressively looked at globally yet. I share their passion to build experiences that scale to hundreds of millions of users.
Q: What are the launch plans for Showt Q1, 2021?
We’d like to have Showt integrated with the top two content platforms, and also have our standalone beta launched by then. We’d like to show value to our customers and investors alike and adopt a 3-6-9 month strategy with validation from each stage.
Q: What is Showt’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition)?
Showt is a global crowd voting platform. It empowers the common person to voice their opinion, to be heard by those that matter, and to hear back from the ones that matter to them. It allows Showters to be anonymous, giving a sense of psychological safety and allowing them to express themselves in an immensely simple user experience.
Q: What is your vision for Showt?
Showt has immense potential in India and globally. The vision with Showt is to grow it into a one-stop place for both Showters and Brands and personalities to interact and be heard. The goal is to make this a hyperlocal experience, tailored to suit the palate of culturally diverse individuals.
Q: What are your obstacles?
Getting the initial cold start problem out of the way, and ensuring that the customers have a constant stream of things that they are passionate about to Showt for. These are the two immediate problems to solve.
Q: Why are you launching Showt first in India? If you want to go global, why not in the US, Europe first, and then come to India?
India is a market with cultural diversity and immensely passionate, opinionated masses. We believe that to scale the product, growth and revenue models in India will enable us to reach similar markets. The total addressable market for this product is over a billion if we’re focusing on India and emerging markets first! At the same time, we also are a lean start-up. We’d love to scale with the right product-market fit and then deploy across other markets globally. This will make customer acquisition very capital efficient.
Q: Can Showt reach all the regional language markets in India?
That’s one of the strengths of the Showt proposition. Also, tailoring the product to cultural nuances of various states/languages in India. For example, did you know you could Showt in 6+ dialects in north-east India itself? Each with hyperlocal topics and cultures. Also, given our strong background in NLP and AI, we’d love to leverage the same in creating hyper-personalised, hyper-localized Showt streams.
Q: You are in fundraising mode. What will your pitch be to investors?
There is a potential 500 million + TAM for Showt in India alone. There’s a unique opportunity to capture. Every Indian has an opinion about people and topics they care about. There is a fundamental need for popularity, status and a sense of “importance”. On the other hand, every brand and public figure would love to hear from their fans/followers. This is a win-win model waiting to be taken. We’d love to have like-minded partners on this journey who see the vision and potential scale of disruption with Showt.
Q: Showt has been testing for a while. How will you contribute to the success story of the new launch?
The initial test runs for Showt have been encouraging. A lot of my efforts will be focused on making sure that the GTM for the product is razor-sharp. And the potential for large scale distribution for the proposition is realised.
Q: What is your vision for Showt in five years?
Showt has massive potential to be a one stop platform for people of all caste, colour, race, religion to be heard anonymously! It also has massive potential for it to be a central aggregator of content that can be Showted for, giving both creators and consumers of the content a viable business model. An infinite Showtstream, which can keep users engaged with people, content, places, events and hobbies that they care about, deeply personalised for them. At the same time, Showt will be a one stop place for brands, celebrities, influencers to have a deep connect back to their followers. I mean, I haven’t seen a single platform do this yet and the potential for this is tremendous. Imagine the power of a Shahrukh Khan fan being able to hear from him on his latest movie or cricket!
Q: What has your career path been over the past 17 years?
I’ve been fortunate enough to work in large companies and small scale start-ups, building experiences for millions of users. From products like Microsoft Outlook to building feature phone App Stores and Messaging platforms.
Q: Who are your mentors?
Patty McCord (Netflix), Dilip Modi (Spice), Rajul Garg (Leo Capital) are just a few mentors who have helped shape my thought process and career to date.
Q What hiring will you be doing at Showt?
We’d look to bolster our product, engineering and AI capabilities. Especially focusing on young talent.
Q: Do you think of yourself as a product guy, or an engineer?
A product engineer :). The best products are built at the intersection of product, design, and engineering, with customer-centric innovation.
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.
