Daybreak - India cracked the code on microdramas. It also cracked the timer

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

China's microdrama industry took nearly eight years — and real government money — to reach the point where regulators had to step in over AI-flooded, quality-degraded content. India's biggest platforms don't have eight years. They're building AI into production from day one, racing to scale catalogues before fatigue sets in. Host Rachel Varghese, gets into why JioHotstar, ShareChat, and Kuku TV are pouring money into two-minute dramas, what a Chinese skincare brand's meteoric rise (and equally fast fall) reveals about the ceiling on this format, and whether India's shortcut to scale comes with a shortcut to burnout too.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In China's Chongchho city, more than 50 film sets crowd a single 10,000 square feet stretch. Each set has, on average, about 200 square feet of space, which is much smaller than a standard studio apartment. Still, they are all distinct from each other. If one looks like a ballroom, the other looks like the inside of a cafe. There's probably another one that looks like a hospital room or the inside of an airplane. And even if you've never seen a Chinese drama before in your life, the kind of scenes that are shot on these sets might still sound familiar. An older woman raises her hand to hit a young girl.

A woman chucks a glass of water across a dining table at a young man. Someone peeks through a door and their eyes widen in shock. Cut to black. Before the slab or even the water lands, before you can see what's on the other side of the door, the video ends. and a pop-up asks you to download the app to watch the rest. It's likely that the app has a short and snappy name, usually with a TV tacked on at the end.

Kuku TV, Story TV, Quick TV, Tadka, Fata-Fat-Furt. These are all Indian platforms, by the way. And they are importing this format that first grew up in China, which is about 60 to 90-second long episodes, always ending with a cliffhanger or twist, and packaging it with the traditional Indian masala. So far, they have been quite successful. In fact, a survey released in India just last week

showed that 80% of respondents had a preference for this format. And if you're wondering why they are popping up with increased frequency on your social media feeds, it's because the timing could not be better for video platforms like Kuku TV and OTTs like GeoHodestar. Even brands are seeing an opportunity for innovative storytelling through this format. Did you know, for example, that Haldi Rams has produced its own microdrama?

You see, Indians are now more on their phone than ever. At the same time, AI is shortening production timelines, reducing costs and enabling real-time data-based insights. This kind of opportunity to scale both content and capture attention has never existed before. The roadmap is China. But the country's industry has had. nearly eight years to mature, with it seeing investments from the government and very enthusiastic brand participation. And only now is it showing early signs of content saturation and quality degradation, especially as AI increasingly becomes an integral part of production. India's ecosystem on the other hand

is still young. Its biggest players are relying heavily on AI already, and experts believe it runs the risk of hitting saturation in just a year instead of eight. So why is everyone, including brands, rushing into this space? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Trey Treyra Vergis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nicaa Nicaa Sharmine and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Wednesday, the 19th of August. 1.2 trillion hours.

That's how much time Indians spent on their phones last. year, according to Ficky Evey's latest report on media and entertainment. And 60% of those hours were also spent on media and entertainment. That, by the way, adds up to 7.20 billion hours, which is roughly equivalent to 82 million years, and that is more time than human beings as a species have even existed. Crazy as that number sounds, it is only going to tick up. Another recent report from Erickson Mobility projects that Indians will be consuming 50GB of data

every month on an average by next year. That's the opportunity. Platforms like Geo Hot Stars Tadka, Amazon's FataFurt, Kuku TV and Story TV are after. And for a nation that has always loved its melodramatic soap operas and cheesy Bollywood, this format is the perfect bait. Now, those same tropes and the drama of it

all are available in snackable sizes. They combine the addictive quality of reels and shorts, which we're all well aware of, with the very human psychological itch of needing to know what happens next. Sora Pande, the CEO of Story TV, explained in a report that the bet is to bring the same old-school content to the swipe of a user's fingertips. The idea is to retain the emotions, the twists and the cliffhangers, but package them differently and make them to fit the scrolling habits of phone users today. And while the different OTTs and streaming incumbents fight for the appointed viewing times, micro dramas fit neatly into the movements between. Think commute times or dry breaks. In fact, the smaller platforms like Story and Kuku

admit that they are not necessarily even trying to compete with OTTs. They feel. frame their content as a complementary viewing experience instead. Their aim is to own the time that people spend when their attention drifts from the screen and they start scrolling on their phone. As for the OTTs that have more recently stepped into the microdrama ring, the content works more as a funnel for platform subscriptions and catalog discovery. That's what my colleague De Banjee Biswas wrote for a piece earlier this year. She wrote that as the OTT ecosystem matured, money started.

to come mostly from ads, not content. A producer who used to work with Geo Studios and Warner Bros told her that micro dramas fit perfectly into the system because they're faster and cheaper to make, rake in watch time and redirect more eyeballs to ads. That's why Tadka is bundled with Geo Hot Stars' existing offerings instead of being a separate platform. Even Amazon's Fata Futt doesn't require a subscription and is entirely ad-supported. For Geo Hot Star, in fact, the Tadka format has actually already proved successful.

They did something very ingenious when they launched. De Banjali noted in her piece that the Tadka Tap launched on the app during IPL season when millions of eyeballs were already on the platform. That was back in April. It took only two months for the service to cross 100 million viewers and that too with just 100 titles on its slate. Ambuj Kashiyap, Geo Starr's executive VP for microcontent, said that this was a sign that the platform was witnessing the emergence of premium microcontent as a meaningful new entertainment category. So far, Gio Hot Star does seem quite serious about scaling into this new entertainment category. From the 100 titles that the service launched with, the aim is to scale to 1,000 by just the end of this year.

That's pretty sizeable investment, even for a company with pockets as deep as geo, for an experiment that's only a few months old. Let me explain. Kunj Sanghui, the senior VP of Kuku FM has across multiple reports put the cost of producing a single drama at 20 to 25 lakh rupees. If the cost is the same or similar for geo, 1,000 titles would cost the company about 200 to 250 crore rupees. That investment is a necessity. Microdramas are sticky for audiences because usually there is something for everyone.

Genres on platforms span from slice of life and romance to thriller, horror, fantasy and even mythology. Such and Singh, the head of Kuku TV called it a volume game in a piece from the Hollywood reporter India. He explained that the more users consume the more they expect. Different tropes, different plots, different genres, Kuku itself started off releasing only about 10 to 20 shows a month, but it has now scaled up to 200 to 250 shows

majorly aided by AI-assisted workflows. Actually, AI is a major reason why investors have started finding the space attractive. Forbes reported last year that microdrama platforms raised $44 million across just six rounds in the first half of 2025 alone. And the enthusiasm starts to make sense when you realize that some investors have already started seeing returns. You see, 314 Capital backed Kuku FM seed round all the way back in 2019. And when the content platform raised $85 million in a CDC last year,

314 sold part of its stake at a return rate of nearly 90%. annually. If that wasn't enough, there is more reason for the excitement, and it's quite simple, really. Mayang Chen, an investor from Stellaris venture partners, told E.B., that even though historically, content production has been a very expensive process, AI holds the great promise to reduce costs by one-fifth to one-tenth. That explains why Indian platforms have not wasted any time in integrating AI. Right now, AI is being used. across companies to test ideas, generate prompts, speed up scripting and handle dubbing. Kuku Sachin Singh describes the platform as already AI native.

50% of Story TV's workflow is AI supported and ShareChat has committed 100 cro rupees just for scaling AI-driven microdrama with the CEO saying that they expect the investment to reduce costs by 70%. But for the market weather format broke out, China, AI production hitting scale has worked out in complicated ways. Stay tuned. Hello, everyone. I am Snigda and I am the co-host and producer of Daybreak, which is the Ken's Daily News podcast.

And I am Praveen. I am the host and producer of 2x2, the Ken's Business Strategy podcast. And Praveen is working on something super exciting and he's here to tell us all about it. Yes, it is actually a project that we are calling the great. rewiring, which is the third edition of the Ken's case competitions. Snickda, you remember the first two case competitions? Of course, I do. And every year, you're getting bigger and better and more popular, PGK.

Well, I certainly hope so. This year, we are actually doing this thing where we are asking students all over India to tell us what happens when agents take over India and how they're going to rewire the lives of Indians all over. Give me an example. Oh, let me tell you this thing. We are actually finding out examples by asking subscribers like you, what are the strange, annoying and weird things that you do that frustrates you?

Maybe things that you procrastinate, maybe things that you don't do, maybe things that you do, but they're very repetitive and very manual. What are the things that you wish you had a digital assistant who could just take over from you? Tell me an example of... Oh my God. I have a big example that everybody can relate to. It is being. bills. Interesting, go on.

It is so annoying, especially the subscriptions and your phone bill, because I don't like the idea of auto pay because I want to have some sense of control over my money and also getting out of auto pay as a hassle. So every month end or beginning, I'm always procrastinating and then I'm getting 10 reminders from Vodafone and like 20 reminders from Spotify and it's just really annoying. Yeah. Wouldn't it be cool, Snickda? If you had a agent that basically look through all the places that you were spending money on subscriptions and all of these other places and would come and tell you, maybe every few weeks, a very friendly agent would come and say, Snickda, I think you should stop doing this. I don't think you're

using this anymore. Oh, you should probably stop doing this other thing or you should replace it. There's a cheaper plan that I think you would like. Wouldn't that be really cool and very helpful? This would be mind-blowing amazing and also so helpful. Yeah, but I think there are going to be other weird things. In fact, subscribers have written to us and told us about things like how they struggle to manage their parents' health or how they're essentially using WhatsApp as a way to store all their documents. So there are all these weird workarounds that people do and you're nodding, so I'm guessing you're one of them. And order to find out, we are running a survey right now. And it's a survey called the Great Rewiring Survey. The link of it is in the show notes.

And we're going to ask you if you're listening to this, take the survey. It's a fun survey. It's just going to take you five minutes and we are even going to tell you what are the weird things that other people confessed. And if you take this survey, you will find out what are the weird things that you're doing and we're going to ask thousands and thousands of student teams all over India over the next two to three months

to build solutions that solve these problems. And how long do we have to wait to hear these weird problems? Maybe just a couple of weeks. We'll be done. All right. Looking forward to it. Yeah, the survey is here. I would recommend you take it.

Yes, please do. Link is in the show notes and please do share it with your friends and family. Yeah, it's very easy to share. And tag us on social media if you're sharing it on social media. Before we get into how exactly AI is changing the game for Chinese micro dramas, I want to tell you about how successful the format was in the country and why it became as popular as it did with brands especially. In 2023, a Chinese skincare brand named Kans partnered with the creator on Doyin, which is the Chinese version of TikTok, to launch five custom microdramas.

Jing Daily writes that the series was made to resonate with professional women with the product placement being subtle but deliberate. Actually, before the series gained popularity, the brand was reportedly seen as dated. But after the series went up, Kahn's full year brand revenue, skyrocketed by more than 140% and it became the platform's first beauty label to reach an annual gross merchandise volume of $830 million. That's the kind of playbook

that brands like Halterrams and RGO are trying to recreate in India. And the survey had mentioned earlier suggests that there is a real opportunity for them. It showed that microdrama has generated 84% brand recall and 82% purchase intent with respondents. And following the Khan's formula, these stories don't really revolve around the brand or its products exactly,

but both are placed in the series and sometimes referred to in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way. Argyo's show revolves around a group of friends living together, Haldi Rams is about office rivalries and drama, and Rennie Cosmetics has a short series with the internet personality, ORI, called Originals. Argyo's show, in fact, does seem to have seen some success. The company reported that the show gathered almost 400 million views across social media platforms. But the brand growth that Khan's saw didn't really stick around for very long. You see, once competitors saw how well the brand was doing, they flooded platforms with similar content.

And Khan's founder said in a report that the effectiveness of microdrama-based advertisements fell by almost 40 times because the supply had exploded. The supply side issue is also exactly what is at risk for platforms in India, especially as AI enables both scale and supply. Nishant Kumar, the CMO of the group that runs Story TV, noted in a report that when a format performs, it gets replicated across the market within weeks. China has seen that problem happen in real time twice now.

once with a branded content like Kans and then again with AI generated content more recently. Now, AI started off as being a post-production assist around 2024. At this point, by the way, the industry was about six years old and had tracked up $7 billion in revenue. When AI started becoming part of production flows, it was only used for stuff like VFX and dubbing. But that changed when TikTok's owner, By Tans, came out with a. an AI video generation tool called C-Dance 2.0. Suddenly, AI-generated titles went from less than 10% to nearly 40% of China's top 100 drama chart in a year. And by early 2026, 10,000 AI-generated titles were being released every month.

The increased volume did not escape regulator's scrutiny. China's national radio and television administration established a tiered review system, based on production budgets and required all AI generated animated content to receive a filing number before release. The administration has also removed more than 25,000 episodes for content violations across both live action and AI generated titles. Though in Group also announced an almost $30 million fund to support live action short drama production. In the industry, this move was understood as an acknowledgement that maybe the AI-transernerner. transition had gone a little too far. And the quality difference has even started showing up in viewers' habits as well.

Out of the nearly 1,000 AI-generated dramas in active circulation by February 26, less than 0.2% crossed the 100 million view mark. Hurti and Ping, a professor at Jenman University, explained in a report why that might be the case. He said, AI-generated videos still show clear gaps in understanding human behavior. Characters may lack coherent logic and visuals can pure inconsistent. Complaints about similar issues are also surfacing in India. The print reported that several dramas suffer from awkward dialogue delivery and scripts that feel poorly adapted.

Sometimes, it even sounds like an English screenplay has been translated into Hindi using AI and no effort has actually been made for the language to sound natural or culturally authentic. In the same print report, Priyanka Bansal, a creative director warned that microdramas may have a lifespan of only a year if producers continue to prioritize quantity and quick profits over quality storytelling. She believes that audiences expect stories that are not just fast-paced but also relatable, coherent and logical. Even a micro-rama writer told the Hollywood reporter India that the only conversation in the writer's room is what happens at which second. They broke it down further to pretty much show what the basic structure looks like for each episode and how mechanically they're written. At 50 to 55 seconds, a slap or a potential intimate scene is inserted, which becomes a hook.

At a minute 25 seconds, viewers can see an open door but not what's inside, only, to create suspense. Basically, the problem is partly that AI is enabling content creation to become a science that works, but in the process, the art is being left behind. A piece from the established explained how Kuku TV, for example, found out that people were drawn to scenes set in aircrafts. This information was shared with writers so that plots could be shaped around it. The result is, of course, more stories with scenes on planes instead of common settings like offices or cafes. Sangvi said in the piece that by using these structures and data-driven methods,

Kuku is increasing its chances of success. But what happens when planes eventually become just as common as an office and, well, slowly, all possible fresh locations are exhausted? That kind of exhaustion is exactly the fate that Indian platforms are trying to avoid. And some have already found a workaround to the possible. saturation and fatigue, the dozens of languages they can produce and expand markets through. Of course, because AI makes multi-language dubbing and translation much easier and much cheaper. Pranavai, a founding partner and chief investor at 314, explained in an ET Entrepreneur report

that the cost of taking one piece of content into multiple languages has fallen drastically with AI. Think about it. It allows a single piece of IP to be multiplexed across markets. And Pai believes that this kind of language multiplexing has turned out to be a particularly powerful strategy for the format. In fact, Story TV's early South Indian titles across Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala have already crossed 250 million views with Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Kuchy now among its top consumption cities. The company plans to produce more than 1,000 original South Indian microdramas by March 2027.

Story TV believes that this will help keep its catalogs fresh because different regions have different content appetites and it's not necessary for each story to resonate across states. Of course, with AI in the picture, scaling catalogs is any platform scheme, as long as they have the capital to invest in it. Content quality though is another challenge altogether. and one that will take time to really show. For China, the format had scaled to size without AI first.

And the moment the boom happened, regulation had to step in. Indian platforms are leading with AI first and using it to expand catalogs and crack multiple audiences through languages in a bid to outrun the fatigue before it kicks in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts.

To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.