iWorld
Zee5 announces Mithya season two
Mumbai: Zee5 has announced the return of the psychological drama Mithya for the second season after the success of the first season. The series revolves around the tumultuous relationship between two half-sisters, marked by ambition, betrayal, and revenge.
Directed by Kapil Sharma and produced by Applause Entertainment in association with Rose Audio Visual Production, the second season of Mithya features a stellar cast, including Huma Qureshi and Avantika Dasani as the half-sisters, alongside Rajit Kapur and Indraneil Sengupta in prominent roles. They are joined by Naveen Kasturia in the new season who will be seen as a mysterious character adding more spice to the lives of the two sisters.
The second season delves deeper into the complex and dysfunctional interpersonal relationships of all the significant characters in the series. With tensions escalating and the stakes higher than ever, Mithya season two premieres soon on Zee5.
Zee5 CBO Manish Kalra said, “After seeing the love the audience had for a successful first season, we are thrilled to bring back Mithya with a more thrilling narrative. With their powerful performances, the cast has brought the complex and layered plot to life, ensuring the series further exemplifies our focus on creative storytelling. Mithya season 2 is also a result of our longstanding and creatively fulfilling partnership with Applause Entertainment and Rose Audio Visuals. We’re looking forward to audience response to Mithya S2 while strengthening our commitment to deliver exceptional stories.”
Applause Entertainment MD Sameer Nair, ” We’re thrilled to return with Mithya for a gripping second season that delves even deeper into its complex narrative. This is far from a conventional thriller — the set-up, location, and intricate relationships push the boundaries of storytelling. At its heart, Mithya is a tale of betrayal and revenge, with the tension between the half-sisters and their fathers reaching new heights. Grounded in a distinctive and immersive narrative, this season draws viewers deeper into a psychological drama of sisters, traumas, and secrets.”
Rose Audio Visuals producer Goldie Bhel said, “We’re thrilled to bring Mithya back for Season 2. This series has always been about exploring the grey areas of truth, deception, and the human psyche, and with this new season, we’re diving even deeper. The response to Season 1 was incredible, and it’s pushed us to take bigger creative risks this time around. We’ve crafted a story that’s darker, more intense, and full of surprises, and we can’t wait for the audience to experience what’s next.”
Director Kapil Sharma expressed, “We are absolutely thrilled to bring our audiences the new season, that is not only rich in story arcs but also visually stunning. Set in breathtaking Darjeeling, we have captured some wonderful performances by the talented cast with high-octane visuals and thrills that enhance the intensity of the narrative. The buzz surrounding the return of Mithya is immense, and we aim to lift our audience’s expectations a notch higher.”
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.
