iWorld
ZEE5 confirms focus on socially relevant content with #ZEE5GameChangers
Mumbai: ZEE5, India and Bharat’s largest home-grown video streaming platform, the OTT arm of ZEEL, in its latest endeavour announced #ZEE5GameChangers to drive awareness on socially relevant issues through its content and marketing initiatives. The campaign was launched by the leading star-cast of ‘Duranga Season 2’ with the female police force at New Delhi Headquarters deliberating on the struggles and achievements of women in the field of law enforcement. The interaction happened between ace actors Amit Sadh, Drashti Dhami, director Rohan Sippy and ZEE5 AVOD marketing head Abhirup Datta.
The campaign was announced with the launch of upcoming psychological thriller ‘Duranga 2’, highlighting the issue of identity theft alongside championing the narrative of a driven female cop. Through its extensive roster of such stories across a multitude of issues, languages, and formats, ZEE5 has always aimed to spotlight crucial matters that warrant awareness and sensitization via entertainment. The #ZEE5GameChangers initiative is an extension of the content on the platform and seeks to drive awareness on pertinent themes whilst fostering change through bold and powerful storytelling. Sharing the experiences and the journey of police workforce, DCP PRO Suman Nalwa engaged in a conversation with Drashti Dhami, the lead actress of Duranga.
Delhi Police hon’ble DCP PRO Suman Nalwa said, “It is extremely heartening to see ZEE5 coming up with socially relevant and appealing content titles, having the capacity to hold the audiences on the tenterhooks. We are also delighted that ZEE5 acknowledges and appreciates the work being done by women police personnel. The female police officers of the Delhi Police Force hail from different parts of the country and work on challenging tasks despite of their struggles and hardships. This acknowledgment and interaction gives us motivation and rejuvenates our commitment to serve the city to the best of our capabilities.”
Datta said, “At ZEE5, our commitment is to invest in educational, innovative, and relatable content. While we celebrate cultural diversity, we remain steadfast in our pursuit of addressing real-life challenges as a consumer-centric brand. We believe in the transformative power of storytelling and recognize that it’s through deliberate and impactful marketing efforts that we can connect/educate/sensitise the wider audience. With #ZEE5GameChangers we aim to create a platform where we can connect, collaborate, and communicate with our viewers through impactful content and marketing initiatives. With every initiative like this, we aim to create conversations that matter and give our audiences greater access to diverse and quality narratives.”
Duranga’s lead actress Drashti Dhami said, “While Duranga gave me a chance to portray the role of a police officer, #ZEE5GameChangers initiative gave me the chance to interact with some of these brave real-life heroes / women police officers in the Delhi force. It was my profound honour to be part of this initiative that not only celebrates the noteworthy achievements of these exceptional women but also ignites crucial conversations surrounding their inspirational journeys. Meeting them served as a great reminder that each of us has the power to break barriers, shatter stereotypes, and make a significant impact. I am truly thrilled to be a part of a moment that recognizes their invaluable contributions to society and acknowledges that their stories need to be heard and celebrated.”
ZEE5 offers a plethora of socially relevant content across languages, fostering inclusivity, breaking stereotypes, and initiating important conversations to empower audiences and inspire change. Duranga is a web-series with 8 episodes, released in August 2022. It is produced by Rose Audio Visuals and starring Amit Sadh, Drashti Dhami, and Gulshan Devaiah as lead actors and offers a captivating love story packaged with mystery and suspense. Directed by Rohan Sippy, the Season 2 of Duranga premiered on 24th October 2023. For this season, fans can expect more twists and revelations as Inspector Ira investigates her seemingly perfect husband’s dark past.
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.
