iWorld
Sony Liv forays into original digital programming with ‘#LoveBytes’
MUMBAI: Multi Screen Media’s (MSM) OTT platform Sony Liv has set its foot into original web programming with the launch of its signature series #LoveBytes. Going online from 7 September, the web series has been exclusively made for the digital platform and is centred on an urban Indian romance, which is relatable for the digital destination’s millennial audience.
The web series is unlike regular television soaps as it deals with the real life situations between a young couple. The digital platform through this offering invites viewers to take a sneak peek into their daily lives. Sony Liv has created a 360 degree marketing campaign with video blogs and social connect with the protagonists to market the show.
Multi Screen Media EVP and head – digital entertainment Uday Sodhi says, “From launching digital premieres of the world’s best entertainment properties to becoming the country’s first digital VOD platform to produce a song, Sony Liv has been at the forefront of innovation. With our signature series #LoveBytes, we offer consumers a digital-first experience like never before. The fact that the show has been made as an independent, exclusive series for Sony Liv also bolsters the widespread popularity of the digital destination. With this, Sony Liv becomes the first digital OTT platform to foray into original production. Setting a benchmark in the video entertainment space, we plan to further invest in original content with new concepts and ideas.”
Sodi informs Indiantelevision.com that the show will have 26 episodes, wherein two episodes will be released per week. “This is just the beginning. Liv will come up with a series of original shows, which will be exclusively produced for the digital platform,” he adds.
Sony Liv has been seeing a year on year growth of 35 per cent on mobile advertising, which, according to Sodhi is indeed encouraging. “The ecosystem will also be enhanced with technical upgradations like 4G,” he says.
While currently Sony Liv follows the advertising based revenue model, Sodhi says that depending on the scenario and market insights going forward, the company may evaluate the possibility of a subscription based platform.
Directed by Vishal Mull, #LoveBytes stars Kushal Punjabi and Sukhmani Sadana. Each episode of the show plays out the trials and tribulations of the leading characters Ananya’s and Abhishek’s romantic relationship.
Ananya Singh is a 26-year old girl from Lucknow who has been working in Mumbai for the last six years. Simple, not very social and rather homely, Ananya is possessive and doesn’t quite understand or appreciate all the female attention her boyfriend gets. Abhishek on the other hand, is a 28 year-old copywriter in a media firm. A party animal, he is best described as driven, ambitious and affable all at once.
With a deliciously urban and youthful flavor, the series underlines what makes these two very different individuals click and sometimes clash, the show also elucidates all those things that are necessary for an urban Indian relationship to sustain itself and the daily challenges that come in the way.
The theme of the show has been specifically crafted keeping Sony Liv’s cosmopolitan viewership in mind. Viewers can delve into this entertaining and delightful world of squabbles, love and drama on the Sony Liv website or mobile app, anytime anywhere.
While the presenting sponsor for the show is Integriti, the associate sponsor is Caprese. The radio partner for #LoveBytes is Fever 104 FM, beverage partner is Café Coffee Day and outdoor partner is Bright Advertising.
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.
