Lal Chand Bisu PUMP UP THE VOLUME

Preparing for this meeting with Lal Chand Bisu, co-founder of digital entertainment company Kuku FM, I started watching a popular microdrama on Kuku TV, an app launched by the company earlier this year for short-form fictional storytelling.

- Shrabonti Bagchi

Preparing for this meeting with Lal Chand Bisu, co-founder of digital entertainment company Kuku FM, I started watching a popular microdrama on Kuku TV, an app launched by the company earlier this year for short-form fictional storytelling. The show, called Revenge of My Fake Boyfriend, turned out to be a slickly produced drama with a tight script and competent acting by fresh faces, aesthetically shot in a vertical video format. Each episode of the show, about a mega-rich girl fake-marrying a self-made businessman, was only about 2.5 minutes long, like all Kuku TV's microdramas—a new genre in India inspired by Korean and Chinese microdramas that the company is largely responsible for popularising over the past few months.

It occurred to me that there was a whole world of entertainment out there that people like me, hooked on British and American TV shows on Netflix and Amazon Prime, are completely unaware of. So when I meet Bisu, 35, at Kuku FM's office in Bengaluru's HSR Layout—the company occupies two floors in a co-working space—one of the first questions I ask is about this fragmentation of entertainment. "This has been happening for a while. Even if you look at user-generated content on social media, your YouTube feed and mine will be completely different," says Bisu. He has no doubt, he says, that this is a good thing. "Now this is happening in professionally made content, what we call premium content, as well. And it is the future of entertainment—because of the high number of content pieces, everyone will have a different feed and library."

Starting at 250,000 subscribers in 2021, the company has just crossed 10 million paid users, with 45% from tier-2 cities.