Long Story Short

Startups with VC money are scripting a dramatic rise in micro dramas. Will the climax have joy or heartbreak?

- By KUNAL PURANDARE

Kushal Singhal was intrigued when he first noticed his mother watching creator stories on Facebook on her phone last September.

Over the next few weeks, he observed that she was glued to the screen multiple times during the day, engrossed in consuming similar bite-sized content, often during breaks from her household chores.

The resident of Rampur, a town 200 km from New Delhi, wondered why his mother did not watch YouTube Shorts, which has videos of up to 180 seconds, or Instagram Reels. “It is not free-flowing content,” the mother explained. When questioned why she did not prefer television, she said: “This is my personal space.”

The ease of access to the device in her bedroom led to her watching those user-generated videos in her spare time, Singhal tells Forbes India. “The phone has become the primary screen,” he says, adding that some of the Facebook videos his mother enjoyed had 150 to 200 million views.

Though monetisation was a concern, the picture was enough for Singhal to take the plunge into a sector witnessing hectic activity in recent times. A former associate director at ShareChat, Singhal joined hands with Pratik Anand, previously senior director-growth at Pocket FM and associate director-growth at Meesho, to start Flick TV, a mobile-first OTT platform dedicated to micro dramas. Launched in January, it began with 100 hours of content and raised $2.3 million in a seed fund round led by Stellaris Venture Partners in June.

A SHOW A MINUTE

Micro dramas are fictional videos with durations of a minute or two that together comprise episodes with storylines—unlike Shorts and Reels that are usually disparate.