Comment
The Year of Rapid Change
By Ranjan Thakur
The year 2013 witnessed a large number of activities in Prasar Bharati and Doordarshan. A major achievement of Doordarshan was in rebranding its Free-to-Air DTH services as ‘DD Freedish’ which highlights its USP of being Free-to-Air. Earlier, the name DD Direct Plus did not catch on because the rural audience could not connect with the name. The name ‘DD Freedish’ now adequately conveys the USP of the product and the DTH service which is quite popular and far ahead of its paid rivals, is likely to increase its popularity further.
The project of commissioning of enhanced capacity to 120 channels up from the present 59 channels is likely to be completed by March, 2014 and will substantially enhance the popularity of the product. It is expected that given the background of the ongoing digitisation process in the country, a large number of cable users will shift to the DD’s Freedish in 2014 especially during the Phase III and Phase IV of the digitisation process when it will start touching the semi-urban and rural viewers.
A matter of great satisfaction for Doordarshan has been the successful auction of the channel slots for the private channels on the DD’s Freedish platform. A series of steps, including staggering of the auction process, enhanced the revenue of DD by nearly 40 per cent from the previous rounds of auction. Presently, the platform is commanding an annual carriage fee of Rs 6 crore per channel due to its large reach.
DD looks forward to the conclusion of the process of launching its international channel, DD India in the territory of Europe. DD has received a very lucrative offer from one of the major operators in Europe for placement of DD India w.e.f. January, 2014, which is likely to be accepted with the approval of the Prasar Bharati Board soon. DD India has already been launched in Canada and will be launched in the territories of Korea, Middle East and Central Asia in Early 2014.
The availability of DD India over the entire Europe including northern parts of Africa will substantially enhance the popularity of DD India globally. As the stakeholders are aware that a global channel requires substantial investment, DD proposes to expand the global footprint of DD India in a phased manner after analysing the experience in Europe, Korea, Canada and Central Asia.
Doordarshan is in the process of finalising its FPC for the expansion of its international channel which will be a mix of news and general entertainment.
Doordarshan also successfully upgraded the four regional channels of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan during 2013. These channels were working in four hour terrestrial mode only while substantial investment in infrastructure, equipment and manpower had already been made. In order to effectively utilise the investment made in these locations, a decision to upgrade these channels to 24 hour cable and satellite channel was taken and implemented within a period three months without any major investment.
The current TAM data indicates that while DD-Bihar and DD-Uttar Pradesh are already No 1, DD- Madhya Pradesh is No 2 while DD-Rajasthan is No 3, in their respective states in terms of popularity. The upgradation of these four state channels is a major step forward to tap the regional television market. DD now proposes to move on to upgradation of DD-Jharkhand, DD-Uttarakhand, DD-Chattisgarh and DD- Himachal Pradesh on the same pattern of the four channels. It was our experience that the viewership of terrestrial channels was adversely affected in cable and satellite territories which needed to be addressed. Given the success of the four regional channels upgradation, Doordarshan is confident that this process will be completed shortly and these channels are likely to be quite popular in their territory.
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We (at DD) expect the next year to be an exciting year when a number of these initiatives will start yielding results for DD with substantial enhancement of revenue besides sourcing of quality software. |
DD has enhanced its role in the industry’s body namely Indian Broadcasting Federation and has a place on the Board of Directors after quite some years. DD expects to play its rightful role being the only public broadcaster in the country and share its experiences while lending its strength to the industry body.
DD is on the Board of Directors of the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), an initiative of the industry to develop alternative TV ratings. DD has substantially increased its role in BARC and as the industry is aware, an alternate television rating system based on the audio watermarking technology is likely to be initiated by June, 2014.
Doordarshan has set up a professional Audience Research Unit to analyse the available data related to the television rating points. In the process, Doordarshan has shut down its Doordarshan Audience Research Team (DART), an in-house system. The present practice of a professional Audience Research Unit has now brought DD at par with its private counterparts.
Amongst several other major initiatives, Doordarshan is in the process of finalisation of external partners for monitoring its channel’s popularity of various networks, especially cable as there have been concerns that the law of the land is not being followed in this regard. DD expects to partner with professional agencies in order to monitor the violations of the law which is likely to improve its viewership as in absence of any carriage fee being paid by DD, cable operators tend to put DD channels in the difficult to watch remote places. DD has finalised the process to appoint a professional agency to provide electronic programming guide to its channels on all cable and DTH platforms besides upgrading its own EPG system on DD’s Freedish.
Doordarshan is in the last stages of finalising the process of outsourcing its corporate advertisement sales of DD News which has faced some difficulties in the recent past. The hiring of a professional agency is likely to improve its marketing of commercial time. DD has also floated an RFP to improve its billing system which would network the entire Doordarshan Kendras for effective marketing, monitoring and billing of the commercial ad time. DD has also focused on the Government business through its Development Communication Division and it is expected that a record increment of 40 per cent in Government revenue received by DD will be registered in this current financial year.
DD has finalised its new commissioning guidelines which are based on the industry accepted practices of Advertisement Funded Programme, revenue sharing and simulcast. These new guidelines are expected to source better quality programming for DD while allowing outside producers to share the positive revenue gained from quality products. This policy will also not require DD to commit itself to funding low quality and low cost programming.
DD is working towards the amendment of the mandatory sharing of Sports Signals Act, 2007 as the present Act requires all sporting events of national importance to be carried on DD National only, where the opportunity cost makes the present arrangement financially unviable. DD was proud to have won the exclusive broadcast rights for the recently concluded World Chess Championship in Chennai. DD has won some major legal battles for the transmission of sports in India as the entire validity of the mandatory sharing of sports Signals Act, 2007 has been questioned in courts. The recent legal victory of Doordarshan in regard to ICC T-20 World Cup Championship in June, 2013 was a shot in the arm for DD.
DD has decided to e-auction its film slots in order to bring in transparencies to the entire system and also enhance revenue by allowing the bidders to buy slots on the best prices as deemed fit.
We expect the next year to be an exciting year when a number of these initiatives will start yielding results for DD with substantial enhancement of revenue besides sourcing of quality software.
(Ranjan Thakur is additional director general – programmes, Doordarshan. The views expressed in the above article are the author’s personal views)
MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.
If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.
What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.
At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.
When OTT finally understood the time problem
For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”
That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.
What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.
Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:
* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing
* Completion rates continued to slide
* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer
At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.
Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.
Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.
There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.
By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.
This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.
In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.
Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.
Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift
ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.
From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.
What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:
* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle
While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.
Why audiences started responding differently
One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.
What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.
On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.
A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:
* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day
This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.
Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.
2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality
The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.
Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:
* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?
This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.
Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.
Failures Became Visible Faster
2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.
Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.
Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.
Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.
The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.
OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit
Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.
OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.
Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.
That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.
What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry
By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:
* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego
Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.
Looking Ahead
Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.
Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.
Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.
2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
