iWorld
Urban Company launches festive ‘Style My Space’ series with celebrity design challenges
Mumbai: Urban Company, a home services platform, in collaboration with YouTube, Next Narrative and Monk Entertainment announced the launch of its YouTube series, Style My Space. Just in time for the festive season, this series will feature some of India’s celebrity friends, including Tanmay Bhat, Aishwarya Mohanraj, Bollywood icons Farah Khan and Maheep Kapoor, and reality TV stars Jasmin Bhasin and Tejasswi Prakash. The celebrity friends will collaborate with Urban Company’s design experts to surprise their close friends with stunning home makeovers using the brand’s signature Wall Panels.
This series celebrates the unique bond between friends while inspiring viewers with creative ideas for simple home upgrades that can dramatically enhance a room’s aesthetic. With the launch of Urban Company’s Wall Panels this year, the desire for trendy, stylish homes is rising. Services like wall molding and panel installations transform spaces, providing homeowners with a quick and impactful way to elevate their interiors. Celebrities take on the challenge of transforming their friends’ spaces in less than a day, highlighting their deep camaraderie and understanding of one another’s unique styles and preferences. The moment of the big reveal captures the authentic joy and surprise of a truly personalised makeover, with each episode filled with nervous anticipation, unexpected twists, and heartwarming laughter.
Urban Company director of marketing Sugandha Gupta said, “At the heart of Style My Space is a commitment to crafting stories that seamlessly marry the essence of our offerings with the evolving needs of our customers. We understand that today’s consumers are looking for more than just products – they seek inspiration, personalisation, and solutions that truly resonate with their lifestyles. Our series reflects this by showcasing how our offerings can transform spaces, helping customers reimagine their environments and elevate their homes with style and function. We’re excited to share these stories that showcase how our brand is integral in helping people create homes that feel truly unique and tailored to their needs.”
Next Narrative founder and CEO Mohit Jagtiani echoed these sentiments, adding, “ At times, content doesn’t need to be overproduced; presenting it in a raw, authentic format is exactly what ‘Style My Space’ is all about. Home makeovers and visual transformations come to life beautifully in formats like these, offering not just valuable information about the product category but also entertainment. Snackable YouTube shorts from these have great reach and inspire audiences. By collaborating with the right creators, we ensure the content is highly shareable, driving conversations and impact.”
Viraj Sheth, Co-founder and CEO of Monk Entertainment emphasized the creative synergy in this series, stating, “It’s been an incredible experience shaping this home makeover show from scratch for Urban Company. We have created 3 episodes, each with guests from different industries – Bollywood, digital creators, and TV stars. With this, we’re able to target different audiences while delivering a unified message about the fantastic wall panelling service that the brand now has to offer. I am certain the content in this show will stir plenty of dinner-table conversations, and thereby drive conversions for the brand.”
Whether you’re seeking a quick-fix design inspiration or looking to enjoy a feel-good series, Style My Space is the perfect way to celebrate the festive season. The first episode will premiere on 27th September on your favourite creator’s channel on YouTube. Don’t miss out as these celebrities bring their creativity and friendship to life in a way that only Urban Company can.
This 3 part series has been conceptualised by Monk Entertainment co-produced by SOL Entertainment.
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.
