At an auto stand outside a Metro station in Noida, 45-year-old driver Alok Singh leans back in the shade of his parked vehicle, unlocks his smartphone with a flick and swipes to one of his most-visited apps.On the small screen, the world narrows to a vertical frame. Dramatic music swells beneath rapid-fire dialogue, the kind that would not be out of place in a television soap. The plot thickens as soon as it begins. A man takes his wife to an upscale restaurant for her birthday. She hesitates at the entrance, saying they would be a misfit among the wealthy patrons. As she turns to leave, she bumps into a man who mocks her for spoiling his Rs-50-lakh suit. The scene cuts to black. End of Episode 1. Before the tension can dissipate, the next episode, another minute-long reel, begins to play. Singh is engrossed. The melodrama, bursts of romance and humiliation, the cliffhanger – all packed into pockets of entertainment, each lasting sixty seconds or less.“I usually watch on Moj (a short-video app). Some run into a hundred episodes. But each one is hardly a minute, so you can finish a story even in your break. Achha timepass hai (It helps pass time),” says Singh.He is one of the many who are drawn into the country’s latest entertainment habit: the microdrama. These bite-sized, reel-style episodes fit neatly into the empty slots of the day — the lull of a commute, the pause for chai, the final moments before sleep.Platforms call this “micro-bingeing”: five, even 10 episodes, consumed in one sitting, with two or three such stints a day. Unlike a meme or a one-off viral clip, these serials are built for continuity with returning characters, slow-burn reveals, emotional payoffs.After wild successes in China and the US, these vertical dramas are now sweeping into India, with an estimated 50 million viewers spread across scores of platforms. China, with over 576 million microdrama viewers, according to the China Daily, is the market leader, producing more than 3,000 online micro-dramas in 2023.It’s a trend and a potential that venture capitalists in India have been quick to spot. Backed by funding, microdrama startups such as Flick TV, Kuku FM, EloElo, Quick TV, and Chai Shots have joined established players in the space such as Balaji Telefilms, Zee Entertainment (ZBullet), and Amazon MX Player (Kutingg).Story continues below this adAccording to Venture Intelligence, a data research and analysis firm, investments in micro drama/short content platforms in India surged to $48 million as of August 2025, up from $15 million in 2024.“These days every investor is running after microdramas,” says Rahul Mittra, the Delhi-based producer of Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster, Bullett Raja, Sarkar 3 and Netflix’s Torbaaz who has been keenly watching the growth of the microdrama sector. “Vertical dramas started in China, became popular in the US, and now they are making waves in India. Investors say the returns could rival the entire film industry,” says Mittra, who has featured in cameo roles in feature films, including Chamkila and the webseries Inspector Avinash.From the three-hour feature to the bingeable OTT mini-series and now, the 60-second cliffhanger, Mittra sees the arc of changing viewer habits. “You have to hook them in the first minute — betrayal, revenge, romance, all packed in. The attention span of the youth has shrunk. Today’s audience is spoilt for choice.”Inside portrait-mode studiosFew new entrants capture the ambition of India’s microdrama boom as vividly as Reeloid, launched in February 2025 by tech entrepreneur-turned-filmmaker Rohit Gupta.Story continues below this adGupta, who has directed eight short films and is working on a documentary with the Indian Navy, spotted the vertical-video wave early. After the pandemic, he experimented with a 12-minute vertical series, sliced into 90-second episodes. At the time, Indian platforms told him, “This won’t work for us.”But in China, companies such as ReelShort were already thriving. “They weren’t targeting India yet, so I thought, why not build a fully Indian platform. No outsourced tech or servers, but with a creator-first approach,” Gupta says.To seed its library, Reeloid (whose name is a portmanteau of reels and celluloid) acquired around 8,000 pieces of international content, including 100 vertical series, mostly Chinese and Korean dramas. But Gupta insists he is not interested in making Chinese remakes, which have flooded the market. “We want to tell very Indian stories such as village politics, family sagas and local heroes. Now, we finally have a platform to do that.”The math, he says, is irresistible. “India has over a hundred crore internet mobile connectivity users, 67 crore Instagram users. Targeting just 5 per cent of them to start out, around 2.1 crore users at Rs 100 a month, would yield Rs 210 crore monthly or a projected $1 billion annual market within three years,” he says.Story continues below this adManohar Singh Charan, co-founder and chief financial officer of ShareChat and Moj, a short-video app launched in 2020, agrees it is a golden moment for the format. “With reducing attention spans and evolving content trends, users have developed a strong affinity for short and snacky content in multiple sessions. This format lets them pull out their phones and entertain themselves whenever there is a moment of idleness.”On Moj, he says, viewers spend 40–60 minutes daily with microdramas, not in one sitting, but in “multiple sessions” threaded through the day.The marketThe shows are finding audiences everywhere, says Charan of Moj. “We aren’t seeing significant differences in engagement time or binge behaviour between Tier-1 and smaller towns: both are highly engaged,” he says.The divergence, he says, lies in what they view. Urban viewers lean toward stories with global influences. In smaller towns, family dramas and narratives about social mobility resonate, especially those featuring the chaos and love of large families and portraits of “gripping personal struggles” and characters who “dream big”.Story continues below this adRegional language content is especially potent. “We have found completion rates double for regionally contextualised stories with indigenous characters,” Charan notes.Shantanu Rangnekar, who both acts in and creates microdramas, can vouch for that. His Bhavki (Marathi) in 2023 and Pushtaini (Hindi) in 2024 were self-produced Instagram series, each with seven to eight episodes.While Rangnekar’s Bhavki, with its Marathi dialogue and local cultural cues, drew strong viewership, Pushtaini, despite its higher production value, struggled because, he believes, it was a Hindi series.Despite this unevenness, Rangnekar believes the format is rich with possibilities. “The content-consuming time of people has reduced after Covid,” Rangnekar says. “Through microdramas, in 2-3 minutes, you can tell a complete story.”Story continues below this adFor Rohit Gupta, the audience is still evolving. “Right now, about 60 to 65 per cent of our viewers are women: mostly working professionals who watch while traveling or waiting in cafés,” he says. “We have not yet tapped into housewives who watch TV serials, but that is a huge chunk we will see in the next few months. For the Gen Z audience, we are creating drama, horror, even science fiction, all on low budgets.”Charan of Moj says viewers, especially in smaller towns, are forming deep attachments to these quick-hit dramas. They discuss characters, debate plot twists, even pitch new storylines in the comments.He says that while platforms initially assumed that younger users would dominate, older viewers have emerged as loyal fans.Money in the minuteFor the producers, part of the format’s appeal is its low entry barrier. While a mainstream Hindi film can cost anywhere between Rs 5 crore and Rs 50 crore to produce, a microdrama season can be made for under Rs 20 lakh and even as low as Rs 50,000, and far less if the team is willing to cut corners.This allows for experimentation: new actors, untested storylines, and hyperlocal themes can be tried without the financial risk of traditional productions.Story continues below this ad“If a platform pays Rs 1 lakh per episode to the makers, that is Rs 8 lakh for eight episodes,” says Rangnekar. “That’s professional rates for short-format storytelling.”For platforms, the monetisation model is evolving. Some rely on ad-supported viewing, inserting quick pre-rolls or montages before each episode to hook the audience.Others experiment with ultra-low subscription prices, sometimes as little as Rs 2, to encourage mass adoption before gradually raising rates or introducing gamified pay-per-episode systems.For all the novelty, Mittra says, the success of the format still hinges on the craft. “The writing and acting have to be amazing,” he says. “In vertical formats, the face becomes a mirror of emotion. The audience can tell instantly if it’s good or bad.”Story continues below this adActor Sonal Parihar, whose television credits include Bade Achhe Lagte Hain, Adaalat and Jag Jaanani Maa Vaishnodevi, among others, has steadily built a career across formats, from primetime soaps to web series such as Tandoor. Now, she’s experimenting with the vertical drama format for platforms such as Kuku TV.At first, Parihar admits, the transition was disorienting. “Earlier, the quality was scary. They would just take Korean dramas and adapt them. The translations were so cheesy that saying yes to a microdrama used to be a no-no as there was no creative satisfaction.”But now that she has been on the sets of a few vertical dramas, she is settling down. Shoots, unlike the long-drawn television schedules, often wrap in three to four days. The sets are different too. The monitor is flipped vertically, mimicking a phone screen. The actors are confined to a narrow portrait frame, every movement calibrated for a space barely wider than a selfie. “Since this is a vertical format, there is not much space to move. So the performance has to be compact,” she says.Will this run last?Despite their popularity, a few breakout hits, a swelling pool of creators, and a rush of investor money, these are still early days for the format. Experts warn that sustaining this momentum will mean tackling quality concerns, avoiding over-reliance on borrowed plots, and the swipe of a restless thumb.Mitra says platforms need to find a revenue model that can survive piracy, pointing out that if microdramas are optimised for mobile viewing, they are also optimised for mobile theft. Entire seasons can be screen-recorded and uploaded to Instagram or Telegram within hours of release. For a model that relies on either subscriptions or controlled ad delivery, this leakage is costly.For Vikrant Krishna Rao Thakre, a Mumbai-based actor working since 2015, the format’s promise has already soured. He appeared in Cursed Daughter and Fake Boyfriend, both on Kuku FM. “The budgets are decent — around Rs 15 lakh,” he says, “but what should be shot in four days is crammed into two or two-and-a-half days. Good performances by actors go to waste because of how badly they are shot.” Emails and messages sent to Kuku FM yielded no response.The vertical format’s visual constraints make things worse. Without wide shots, chemistry between actors is often lost. Also, microdramas are stitched from isolated close-ups, sometimes filmed separately. “We don’t even know how the co-actor has performed,” Thakre says. “There are no on-set readings. In India, the production of these short dramas has started on a bad note.”Storylines, frequently adapted wholesale from Korean and Chinese dramas, follow predictable beats, often, as Thakre says, “removed from logic”.Moj’s Charan, however, is bullish. With wider Internet adoption, he says, the next 300 million online users will come largely from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities — each of them, a potential market for the industry.He predicts that regional creators will grow in influence, storytelling will become more localised and culturally nuanced, and the short, episodic format will fit seamlessly into India’s mobile-first, multilingual rhythms.Advertisers are circling, scalable production models are emerging, and engagement is strong. “Over the next three to five years,” Charan predicts, “microdramas will be a mainstream content category, with significant monetisation opportunities, especially on ad-supported platforms.”For viewers such as Alok, the auto driver in Noida, though, the habit is already ingrained. Between fares, errands and phone calls, there is always time for one more episode.