iWorld
We’ve renewed most shows for next seasons: SonyLIV’s Ashish Golwalkar
Mumbai: SonyLIV is planning a strong content slate for 2022 with the returning seasons of its popular franchises such as “Undekhi,” “Scam,” “Maharani,” “Gullak,” “Rocket Boys,” “Avrodh” and more. The OTT streaming service is also planning to release new series helmed by filmmakers Vikas Bahl, Imtiaz Ali and Subhash Kapoor.
“This financial year is looking very exciting for us and we’re planning a strong content slate from the beginning of March this year to the end of March next year,” said Sony Pictures Networks India head content – Sony Entertainment Television and digital business Ashish Golwalkar. “Most of our shows have, fortunately, done well for us so they’re coming back for a second season. Some of them are genre defining shows such as ‘Scam’ and ‘Rocket Boys’. We’ve also renewed all our shows with Applause Entertainment including ‘Scam’, ‘Your Honor’, ‘Undekhi’ and ‘Avrodh’. All the shows that TVF have done for us are also returning including ‘Gullak’, ‘College Romance’, ‘Cubicle’, ‘Shantit Kranti’, ‘Girls Hostel’. So, we’ve renewed most of our shows for subsequent seasons.”
According to Golwalkar, the platform looks at 30-day viewership metrics, social media chatter and other indicators to take the call to renew a show for a new season. The video-on-demand platform’s latest show “Undekhi” was recommissioned almost immediately after the pandemic and will begin streaming on 4 March. Many of the shows that were launched in 2020 are looking at a delayed release due to the disruption of the pandemic.
“’Undekhi’ was one our first shows that we dropped and the subscriber base then and the subscriber base today have a huge difference,” observed Golwalkar. “While I don’t think we are trend setters in any way, I can say that we’re very committed to our content lens and create shows that are engaging, slightly cerebral and very native in their appeal. We are also committed to our mission of telling stories of India.” By no means are we trend setters in any way. All I can say is that we are very committed to our content lens. We create shows that are engaging, slightly cerebral and very native. We are committed to our mission of telling stories of India.
On the regional piece, Golkwalkar said, “’Shantit Kranti’ season one did very well for us and you can expect a season 2. This year you’ll see at least five to six very good Marathi shows from us coming on SonyLIV.”
The platform is also strengthening its regional content library by acquiring popular South language films. “Increasingly the way people consume content is changing and they’re becoming language agnostic. And we believe that there is a lot of scope to explore content within the regional languages of India,” he added.
Its highly anticipated “Scam 2003: The Curious Case of Abdul Kareen Telgi” is also expected to release on the platform this year. “We’ve almost finished the writing and we’ll begin shooting by the end of March,” said Applause Entertainment head of content Deepak Segal. “The only detail we can share is that Scam 2003 is not a continuation of season one but is a completely new story,” revealed Golwalkar.
“We look for longevity in our shows where we know that something like ‘Rocket Boys’ will be relevant even 50 years from now,” said Golwalkar.
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.
