India’s Microdrama Boom: How Data, Desire and Aritifical Intelligence Are Reshaping Entertainment

Sometime in early 2024, Kunj Sanghvi, then Vice President of KUKU, the podcast and audiobook platform, was traveling around Korea and China. “We went there to learn more about the audio business, but one day, our cab-driver showed us a video of Baahubali (2015) in the format of a microdrama — vertical and broken into two minute episodes with a Korean dub,” Sanghvi tells THR India.  

Something had shifted in the public appetite. Back in India, they began experimenting. “We saw the adoption of reels and YouTube stories — a lot of YouTube traffic was now going to shorts, instead of horizontal videos,” Sanghvi notes.

They sniffed around the data, trying to pin down lurking meaning. They noticed the audio platform was getting engagement in the middle of the day, unlike streaming and television. “These were people finding small islands of time, like their lunch break or their commute or in between tasks. We realized we had to own this time. Microdramas supercharged that.” 

If Netflix was, as its CEO Ted Sarandos infamously stated, competing with sleep, then, KukuTV was going to own fallow time. Everything is real estate. Everything is competition. Even attention. Even time.   

In November 2024, they “committed to microdramas”, dubbing Chinese and Korean content that they got rights for. They tried cutting existing films, like Welcome (2007), into the vertical format—but that did not seem to work. “We realised we had to curate this format, by working on the storyline and the structure of the microdrama,” Sachin Singh, Head of KukuTV, tells THR India. Besides, an entire ecosystem needed to be built from the ground up—from writers, directors and technicians to production partners who could execute the shows per instruction. January 2025 onwards, KukuTV started releasing originals.

Into The Micro-nomics

Within the larger industry, too, the winds perceptibly shifted around early 2025. Sharlton Menezes, Vice President for IP & Key Partnerships at Pratilipi, one of India’s largest digital storytelling platforms, was taking meetings with streaming platforms. On the agenda was long-form content, but “they were, instead, speaking to us about microdramas.” 

Birthed out of China in 2018, microdramas have since captured the imagination of the United States of America, moving to Latin America and South-East Asia before landing on Indian shores. Why was India a late adopter of this format? 

“There might be geopolitical reasons for this,” a senior executive at a microdrama platform told THR India on conditions of anonymity. “Because TikTok was banned in India, the speed of innovation on this front slowed down. Instagram was late to adopt the reels trend. India lost a couple of years there.” 

Globally, microdramas have solidified into a respectable genre, becoming more than a passing fad. In 2024, for example, revenues from the format surpassed the Chinese box-office. It was only time India, with a plateauing streaming scene and fragile theatrical footfalls, would dip its toes into this genre that catered to and was made possible by the shredded attention span of the spectator and the desire to abolish boredom. 

While KukuTV launched in 2024, its rival, StoryTV, launched in mid-2025, becoming the second most popular microdrama app. Today, KukuTV has over 100 million downloads, and StoryTV has over 90 million downloads on Android. These numbers are only growing, as more platforms are mushrooming.  

Streaming platforms, not to be left behind, have branched out to include microdramas — ZEE5 launched Bullet in July 2025; Balaji Telefilms launched Kutting in January 2026; Amazon Prime Video launched Fatafat in March 2026; JioHotstar launched Tadka in April 2026 during IPL to funnel existing users into another rabbit hole of content. Regional language OTT platforms like the Bengali-language HoiChoi, too, have dipped their toes in, launching Sooper, its Hindi-language microdrama platform. 

Ormax and Meta’s research report, released in March 2026, noted that 65 per cent of microdrama viewers discovered it within the last year. It is a quickly growing target audience, but it also means that “consumer norms and habits are still being formed, rather than being fully established”. For example, most still call it ‘short story videos’ or ‘short dramas’ instead of ‘microdrama’, which hasn’t caught on. They have also discovered this medium not with intent, but through the algorithm, accidentally. You watch the first episode on Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts, which ends on a cliff-hanger. To watch more, you download the app. The content is the advertisement. 

KukuTV is experimenting with various subscription models — ₹399 for a quarterly plan and ₹899 for an annual plan; it also has a coins-based payment system, where users purchase virtual coins and pay per episode. StoryTV, on the other hand, has ₹699 for a quarterly and ₹1099 for an annual plan. While KukuTV has over 10 million+ paid subscribers, StoryTV currently has 3.5 million+ paid subscribers. 

Seeing its potential, money is being pumped into the ecosystem. In July 2025, for example, Hyderabad-based Chai Bisket raised $5 million in a seed round, with actor Rana Daggubati joining as an angel investor. Within six months, in December 2025, they launched the micro drama platform Chai Shots 75 with original shows in Telugu, soon to expand into Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, and Assamese. Pratilipi shed another million dollars into the ecosystem to make microdramas. 

Even legacy production houses like Yash Raj Films (YRF) and Red Chillies have thrown in their lot with the trend, with YRF expected to invest around ₹150 crore over the next few years to develop microdramas. MS Dhoni has joined Kuku as both investor and brand ambassador.

Running The Tech Race

Currently, microdramas are worth $300 million, and according to a report by investment firm Lumikai, is projected to hit $1.5 billion by the end of 2026, making it the fastest growing, most promising vertical in the entertainment sector. For context, Indian theatrical is roughly $1.5 billion. 

What makes microdramas distinct and different is not just their format, but the larger infrastructure. Both StoryTV and Kuku are based out of HSR Layout in Bengaluru, known for its IT parks, tech startups, and corporate offices. This is not unusual, for they are the apogee of data-driven storytelling—a trend that streaming inaugurated, where suddenly platforms had access to robust data, not only of how many people are watching, but how they engage with it, when they drop off, etc. and map it to the demographic characteristics to build portraits of their target audience. These platforms are, essentially, startups, run by entrepreneurs. They are selling a product that needs to be optimised, though Menezes cautions against such a simplistic reading. “It is science matching creativity—how to bring hook-points in a 25-episode show?”

Menezes launched Double Tap Films, a studio for microdramas in April 2026. Double Tap Films acquired the rights to 35,000 stories that Pratilipi already had. Using tools which enumerate engagement data for these stories, they pick out the best to adapt into screenplays. “It is a fairly long process of 10 days, which can be brought down to four days because we have built screenwriting tools that enable writers to build better structure. We produce about 45 to 60 scripts in a month,” Menezes tells THR India.

Then comes the shooting, which is also built to scale. They have line producers who work with them, who are given scripts which “fit within the production guidelines. Shooting takes roughly 2 to 3 days. Post production and quality checks take a week to 10 days. For us, a full show — 30 to 35 episodes, a total duration of 75 to 80 minutes — would take 15 days from the idea to the product. A slightly longer show would take 20 to 25 days.” 

Double Tap Films has launched with a slate of over 150 microdramas distributed across more than 10 platforms, including Amazon Prime Video, MX Player, Zupee, Hungama OTT, Fatafat, Reelies, Story TV, Vertical TV, KLIP and DramaWave. That Menezes feels this is a “slow-moving piece” tells you the pace at which the microdrama world is working, “In China, commissioning operates at scale, unlike India.”

India, though, is catching up. KukuTV, for example, began with dropping 10 to 20 shows a month, and within four months scaled up to 150 to 200 shows a month. “Now, on average, every month we release 200 to 250 shows. Within the next year, we hope to get to at least 1000 microdramas every month,” Sachin Singh, Head of KukuTV, tells THR India. 

StoryTV, too, puts out five shows a day, which chalks up to roughly 150 shows a month. They also have a data-science system that, according to GSN Aditya, StoryTV’s COO, “scans past trends and makes a prediction on what the slate should broadly be for the month to come — how many thrillers, fantasies, billionaire tropes, revenge arcs, etc.” They also have a script prediction engine “which evaluates dialogues — cross-referenced with all the past trends on the platform — and like a writing aid, the suggestions go back to the script writer. Now the writer has to resolve this, or override it. This is how we fine tune a script.”

Shoot and Scoot

Microdramas, Singh notes, is a “volume game”, and this means that “the more users are consuming, the more they are expecting — different tropes, different plots, different genres.” They are able to achieve this volume by partnering with production houses in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, Bhopal, and Jaipur. 

Though KukuFM is headquartered in Bengaluru, in September 2025, they created an entire content unit in Mumbai, to keep the connection with technicians and actors, mostly based out of Mumbai. 

On average it costs between ₹20,000 to 30,000 a minute, which comes up to about ₹20 to 25 lakhs for a show. Questions around labour exploitation, stretched work hours, and fair compensation have been raised by production houses — and this is something that microdrama platforms will have to consider as they scale up in their respective journeys. 

The Use of AI and Cost Control

With AI, though, these costs will significantly fall. Not only does AI enable scale, but as Sambbhav Khettarpal, Head of content at Sooper, notes, “You can make a vertical show with two to three lakhs, cutting the cost by a tenth. Top performing International shows are fully AI.”

AI is currently being used at every point in the workflow. “AI is a copilot right from gauging the potential of stories, helping fix a script, to make it more engaging, to production planning,” Sanghvi notes. “We also do a pre-visualisation where the entire micro drama is done with AI, and that becomes a visual contract between us, the platform, and the production house that we have hired to shoot it. AI also helps identify hook points and cliff hangers.”

AI is also used in dubbing and background music, though Sanghvi cautions that given the current state of AI, it would not be advisable to use it end-to-end, “because AI’s dramatic language in Indian languages has not evolved. It is still basic. Though, in the future, we will have a variety of microdramas, some 100 per cent AI made, some 100 per cent human made.”

Currently, AI is also being used to summon Rolls-Royces and helicopters onto the small screen — a common summoning given the format’s obsession with billionaire love stories. “We shoot the actor in a Swift Desire and using AI, put them in a Rolls Royce,” Sanghvi notes. AI will also enable forays into different genres that often have high production costs — period dramas and sci-fi, for example. 

If the stories right now seem to be roughly skewing romance, with billionaire boyfriends and hidden billionaires, it is because, as Menezes notes, “these shows need lesser locations, are easier, quicker to shoot, and do not require too much VFX.”

Strides are being made away from romance. KukuTV is moving into new genres — launching non-fiction, crime thrillers, suspense dramas, horror, and mythology. They are currently planning the first reality show in the space. Story TV has launched Story TV Dailies, where, instead of dropping all episodes in one go, they drop new episodes every day. This would challenge the perception that microdramas are not sticky, with users coming back every day to continue a story they left off.

Microdramas currently have lassoed in people from the 18 to 40 age category, mostly skewing male, unlike the United States of America, which skews female. Since marketing ends up landing most people on the first episode, completion rates of 50 to 60 per cent is the benchmark. “Each user clocking more than 100 minutes a day on our platform is a marker of success,” Singh notes. 

There might be what Menezes calls “location fatigue” with repetitive stories and tropes being recycled. Data, afterall, catalogues existing desires. It cannot drive future desire. There is a danger of the genre falling into the data trap. But as microdramas evolve, struggling with the same pressure that squeezed streaming platforms — plateauing subscribers, Bollywood stars entering the mix, ballooning costs — they will have to find novel, consistent, and exciting ways of “owning time”. Whatever the trials, Khetarpal notes, “the format 9:16 is here to stay. Even if the current set of stories are not sustainable, people will learn and come up with better stories.”