iWorld
Sports organisations dive into creating own digital ventures
MUMBAI: When cord-cutting started to become a phenomenon, there was a perception that live sports was one of the reasons why people wouldn’t cut the cord. In last two years, however, sports have proved to be a game changer for over-the-top (OTT) services. As a result, several major sports federations are taking initiatives to launch their own streaming services.
Broadcasters have become frenzied when it comes to bidding for sporting tournaments with everyone letting their purses loose. Traditional broadcasters have led the way till now but sports federations are trying to make a mark of their own for dedicated and new fans.
Recent reports suggest that La Liga, Spain’s football governing body has planned to launch an OTT service. It aims to secure €1.3 billion a year for the TV rights, but pay-TV operators are not willing to pay such a sum. Football fans across the globe eagerly wait for La Liga matches but yet broadcasters view the amount as a non-profitable sum.
The availability of OTT platforms is enabling La Liga organisers to stick to the amount they are demanding. Javier Tebas, president of La Liga recently said at a conference in Barcelona, that if the bids don’t meet their expectation they won’t grant the rights. Moreover, the OTT platform La Liga is already working on will be a free multi sports streaming service adding more value to it.
Another world class tournament, which has a fan worldwide, has a full-fledged plan to launch its OTT F1 TV. While La Liga’s plan to make its OTT service free, F1 TV is going to be a subscription-based commercial free service. Aimed at core fans of Formula One, its plans to ace digital transformation is definitely a huge one.
Like many OTT players worldwide, who don’t want non-paying viewers to jump out, the Formula One committee will offer a less expensive, non-live subscription tier, F1 TV Access. It will provide live race timing data and radio commentary, as well as extended highlights of each session from the race weekend. Knowing the fact that streaming live sports with lowest latency might be a challenge, it has relied on Tata Communications for CDN and connectivity services.
The inclination to reach the global audience through a digital platform touched the Winter Olympics too. One of the main aims of the digital coverage is to engage fans more with the ongoing tournament to keep the excitement high. 2018 was the first year to witness digital coverage of this ancient sporting event. Olympic Channel aired Olympic Games coverage live for the first time on its global digital platform at olympicchannel.com and mobile apps for Android and iOS.
Such attempts allow sports organisations the opportunity to reach fans on own terms and develop a direct relation with them. Along with coping with change in viewers’ habit, it may help them to evade the complex bidding process.
Though the trend seems new, WWE is one of the earliest examples to dive into OTT streaming service in 2013. WWE saw multiple benefits from offering its OTT subscription service to viewers including addition of more than a million active subscribers within a short term according to reports. Other than that, what they got is data. A spokesperson from the company itself said, they could track when viewers are watching, what device they are using, how long they are watching, etc.
By using your own OTT app federations can directly know their audience by gathering data. Using this information of viewer’s habit and demographics, the organisations can revamp the branding of the leagues in future. Especially, in such a context when on-demand sports content is a must in the future.
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.
