After cinema to telly soaps to YouTube and OTT, what’s the next frontier in mass entertainment? The answer is already knocking on Indian shores, and it’s called micro dramas.
Micro dramas are billed as the biggest thing to happen to Chinese mass media and internet since Douyin, that’s the Chinese TikTok, and Alibaba, if you want to extend the radius further to include e-commerce platforms, too. The market for micro dramas in China alone is easily upwards of 6 billion dollars, and that’s a conservative estimate, while in the US where it is a relatively new thing, figures say it’s already a market of more than 1 billion dollars.
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What exactly is a micro drama?
These are mobile-first (think vertical-angled), reel-sized (think Instagram) snippety episodes of a gripping romance or family drama, each episode barely 2 minutes or so long, with the story spread across 50 to 100 episodes — the typical business model is to offer 5 to 10 or even more snippets free, and then charge a minuscule amount, like, say, 5 rupees per ‘episode’, for the rest. An alluring proposition since the stories are fast-paced and full of twists and turns, and every snippet invariably ends with a cliffhanger, tempting viewers to press the ‘pay’ button.
A soap opera by any other name would smell sweeter, when it is fast-paced, unpredictable and easily accessible on your phone!
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“Imagine, an entire Netflix episode on your phone in reel style, in one or two minutes — that’s what micro dramas have done in reimagining the world of content,” said Arjun Vaidya, entrepreneur and early stage venture capitalist explaining the popularity of micro dramas on Instagram. “Attention spans are now down to less than eight seconds, users are so used to snackable reel-style content.”
Indian entrepreneurs have taken note. Early movers include the likes of OTT platform Amazon MX Player as well as local language audio content app KukuFM.
The latter has even launched a dedicated app aimed at the micro drama market, called Kuku TV, and claims it already has 5 million downloads in the beta phase. Vinod Kumar Meena, co-founder & COO said, “Traditional OTTs aren’t built for India’s mobile-first audience, whose attention spans are rapidly shrinking. 90% of Indians consume vertical videos on social media, yet there is no dedicated premium OTT platform for this format. With Kuku TV, we are bringing the next wave of entertainment—high-quality, serialised vertical storytelling, available across Indian languages.”
While micro dramas have the potential to transform viewing habits —in China already their revenues have overtaken cinema box-office last year, in India it could also offer new avenues for creative talent. According to Meena of Kuku TV, “The platform isn’t just about streaming—it’s about democratising storytelling. 95% of Indian films and creative talent remain undiscovered because traditional distribution models don’t work for them.”
Meena says the new format could change all that, “offering filmmakers and content creators a mobile-first, direct-to-consumer platform to distribute and monetise their work.” The creator economy may just have found a way to get out of the influencer quagmire it has gotten itself into.
