iWorld
We aim to double our current subscriber base: OIL CEO Yugal Kishore Sharma
Mumbai: OneOTT Intertainment Ltd (OIL), the broadband subsidiary of NxtDigital Ltd (NDL), the media vertical of the Hinduja Group crossed one million wired home broadband subscribers. OIL added over 200,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter of FY22 recording a growth of 65 per cent over FY21.
In an interaction with IndianTelevision.com, OIL CEO Yugal Kishore Sharma speaks about the progress made and the goals for the broadband subsidiary.
What targets has OneOTT Intertainment set for the year?
OIL has achieved a robust growth clocking a CAGR of close to 75 per cent in the last six years and we hope to continue this momentum in fiscal 2023. Whilst we remain on track to add over half a million customers, if not more, in this fiscal; we do have an ambitious plan to double our current subscriber base. This will propel us into India’s top three private internet service providers.
What is the game plan to get there?
At OIL, the success mantra has been our focused approach to extend a consistent customer experience bundled with ‘predictable & proactive customer responsiveness and care.’ The success of this mantra is reflected in our performance; in Q4 of FY22, we added over 200,000 customers, a milestone achievement by any yardstick.
We launched a FTPD or ‘faster-than-pizza-delivery’ initiative that challenges our customer responsiveness to be faster and more efficient than that of QSR brands. This has led OIL to enhance its SLAs resulting in lowest-customer-Churn well below the industry average of one per cent.
What is the USP of OneOTT Intertainment versus competition?
The USP is embedded in one of our groups principle ‘Partnership for Growth.’ This is a model that is driven actively by NxtDigital across the digital distribution space; and as a subsidiary of NxtDigital we have adapted the model effectively in the broadband industry. OIL has evolved an industry first and innovative ISPs Aggregator Model that has contributed to rejuvenating India’s passionate entrepreneurs running small and medium ISPs.
The model continues to successfully consolidate and unify the MSO ISP Industry as a strategic alliance partner. We’re pleased to state that we should have more than 50 such ISPs or alliance partners within our OIL umbrella in the first half of this fiscal.
What growth in digital consumption was seen during a lockdown? How were you able to capitalise on it?
Team OIL, along with its parent digital platforms company NxtDigital, introduced the industry to its vision of providing an always-on-high-speed-internet-access to transform the lives of the customers for their on-demand entertainment. In fact, we have aptly coined a new term for such a service demand – Intertainment.
OIL is better prepared to offer its Intertainment services across OTT, live TV, VOD, movies, and gaming. At the onset of the first lockdown, our customers and their family members had to work, study and play from home, thereby, increasing the bandwidth consumption by almost 50 per cent. OIL through its Intertainment platform along with an innovative product-mix and promotional bundles was able to meet customer demands without passing any incremental cost.
Which are the key cities and towns where you see the most potential?
Our vision is a reflection of our groups mission – to facilitate digital inclusion in India through innovative technology, keeping alive the entrepreneurship spirit of small and medium ISPs. We aspire to serve as many as citizens as possible across the country. We will continue to leverage the vast network of over 1,500 cities and towns that NxtDigital currently delivers digital television and other services to.
What is the big challenge in delivering high speed to consumers?
There are challenges, but we’re also grateful to the government for bringing in appropriate guidelines to help the industry accelerate and grow. We are sure that two key issues that do often serve as stumbling blocks viz Right of Way (RoW) permissions and the need for standardisation on concurrency and contention ratios across ISPs and TSPs will be addressed soon.
Could you talk about the tie-ups that you have with companies like Facebook, Nokia?
OIL’s strategic alliance with Facebook India has made fast internet not just available but also reliable and affordable on Wi-Fi and other last-mile-access technologies at Dharavi and other such areas.
We are very conscious about best-in-class technology and have partnered with leading technology companies like Nokia, Juniper, Huawei and others across core, aggregate, access, analytics and security solutions. OIL’s Technology Partners have also come up with innovative ‘Enterprise-5G’ solutions that can be leveraged extensively.
Finally what is your view on 5G and how it will revolutionise data consumption?
With 5G, the world will be much faster connected on mobile internet with 10 times data speeds as compared to current networks. This newfound capability could see the emergence of cutting-edge solutions to benefit users.
The top ISPs along with ‘Enterprise-5G’ spectrum could have the capability and resources to build large campus-wide connectivity solutions for enterprise networks powered on a common 5G backhaul. 5G rollout topology is on a ‘small-cell-architecture’ network which is in a radius of half a kilometre vis-à -vis 1.5~2 Kms of a cellular network architecture. This would complement OIL’s Fibre-To-The-Home (FTTH) network roll-out and related services.
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.
