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Mobile Video Monetization: The Way Forward
Players in the delivery ecosystem must start collaborating to increase the size of the market; Simplified regulatory framework that facilitates content-sharing needed.
Digivive’ flagship, award-winning application nexGTv offers users entertainment across multi-screen devices, be it mobile, tablets or laptop/PCs. The choice of entertainment is a suite of movies, Live TV, TV shows and videos. Besides ranking among the top 10 entertainment applications in App Stores, nexGTv has also won ‘The Best Digital Experience’ award at the prestigious World Communication Awards 2014, at London. It runs seamlessly across 2G/EDGE/3G/4G and Wi-Fi networks across platforms such as Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Tizen, enabling consumers to remain entertained irrespective of bandwidth limitations and operating platform. Digivive’s General Manager of Marketing Gaurav Sahni shares his perspective about monetizing one of the most exciting mediums today – mobile video.
Rise of OTT and Mobile Video
Wikipedia defines ‘entertainment’ as ‘a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience, or gives pleasure and delight’.That definition is so very apt, but nowadays, another keyword is rapidly becoming part of this definition – i.e. mobile. It’s increasingly becoming the new mass media for information, supplanting traditional media channels, even the internet, which is starting to bring about an inevitable transformation into our social, demographic, and psychological work environment, impacting usage and consumption in varied ways.
Going forward, mobiles and more especially smartphones are expected to become the main drivers or carriers of all kinds of information including entertainment. Like in the rest of the world, the ongoing digital transformations in India including access to mobile internet are progressively catalysing the move towards rapid penetration of mobile entertainment including audio and video (includes Live TV, Video on Demand, TV Shows, Movies, etc.). However, growth in mobile video is expected to far outstrip the growth in mobile audio. In fact, reports indicate that mobile video is expected to form nearly three quarters of all mobile data traffic by 2019. A recent Ericsson Mobility report highlighted that India showed the fastest growth in net additions to mobile subscriber base followed by China. Current IAMAI and KPMG reports indicate that India will have around 236 million mobile internet users by 2016, and 314 million by 2017 which echoes reports from other sources.
The explosive growth of smartphones in India over the past couple of years indicates the keenness of Indian audience to stay abreast and embrace the latest digital trends. Social media, content sharing, e-shopping and permeation of 3G networks together with steps undertaken by telcos to launch 4G have created an undisputable case for mobile entertainment, fuelling enthusiasm of content players and consumers alike. In fact, a lot of industry experts expect 4G to be an inflection point for mobile video in the coming years. Rising incomes, including a proportionately higher spend on entertainment is expected to be supplemented by an increase in internet-enabled devices, cheaper handsets and availability of affordable data plans.
According to industry reports, mobile video traffic exceeded 50 percent of traffic for the first time in 2012 globally. With data consumption outstripping voice traffic on networks and growing in an unprecedented manner, demand for content availability over multiple platforms such as mobile, tablets and laptops, is creating new opportunities for content owners, providers, publishers, communication service providers as well as technology providers, all of which are now working to not only understand, but also leverage these radical changes for business growth and consumer benefit.
With service provider owned data pipelines stabilizing, internet access has revolutionized the entire Over-the-Top (OTT) business ecosystem, not only creating new businesses but also newer ways of working that have opened up innovative revenue streams even for existing ventures. OTT video – a prime example is growing in leaps and bounds, aided by a growing consumers push to consume video anywhere, at any time and on any device.
These developments are not just affecting existing industry dynamics and setups but throwing up new challenges that have the power to format entire media, mobile, entertainment, regulatory and content ecosystems. While the Indian OTT market is comparatively nascent, it nevertheless holds substantial promise for both free (ad-supported) and paid (subscription-led) services, given the rising smartphone penetration in most cities, citizen and subscriber mobility, complimented by enhanced data usage on the networks.
Monetizing Mobile Video: The Way Forward
Industry participants including providers of services, content, publishers and broadcasters alike have started to realize the potential of mobile TV and video. For content owners and broadcasters, OTT means new distribution opportunities, opening avenues to expand viewership and revenue both via paid and advertising models. For service providers, OTT creates a new revenue generation opportunity by ensuring delivery of entertainment at the last mile, using their data pipes.
With mobile emerging as one of the most effective and truly personal advertising platforms, companies are devising ever newer strategies to target and engage audiences via innovative and programmatic formats which are increasingly becoming self-learning or intuitive. Aside from social networking, mobile are the ‘media of choice’ for online bookings, financial transactions, shopping, essential services, entertainment and even employee communications. Tech companies are increasingly using such platforms for targeted communication while promoting their apps.
However, like all industries, the rapidly evolving mobile video domain in India is also facing its own set of emerging challenges. As competition over viewers, advertisers, eyeballs, content, pipelines, hits, and subscriber lifecycles intensifies, lack of consensus over reporting metrics, pricing, formats, network quality of service (QoS) and likely revenue share serve to dampen an otherwise spirited and expanding market. There is also uncertainty over choosing mobile web or in-app channels for meeting advertisement targets.
In spite of the above concerns, mobile video has proven to be highly successful in several markets, delivering higher user engagement on mobile devices. Of late, advertisers have also started to embrace video advertisements on the mobile as part of their cross-channel strategy.
The question about having an ideal monetization framework that splits available revenue evenly between all players however, remains. In order to monetize the opportunity, content owners, broadcasters, aggregators, publishers and service providers need to start collaborating to first define and increase the size of the addressable market. With television and cable transmission going digital, there exists tremendous scope of expansion under the framework of the Government’s digital inclusion program especially in Tier 2 and 3 cities and beyond for an entertainment-starved populace.
Much like the Cable and TV industry, creation of a progressive and simplified regulatory framework that facilitates content-sharing, boosts access to mobile entertainment, and ensures a level playing field for all is also a critical need of the hour. While ‘content’ is increasingly regarded as King, the industry is rapidly realising the role and importance of every other player including aggregators, advertisers as well as bandwidth owners or service providers to ensure the creation, curation and delivery of a complete and immersive mobile entertainment experience.
Additionally, while advertising has been and remains a proven mechanism to earn revenue or recover cost, players in the digital and mobile ecosystem as well as end-consumers, are increasingly realizing that creation and distribution of quality content is costly. ‘Subscription’ therefore, appears to be a viable mechanism being slowly embraced by industry players.
To each his own seems to be the short-term mantra and while one can see the entire category being rife with innovative business models, an ideal or near perfect monetization structure seems to be sometime away, given the proliferation and abundance of not just content, but also mobile TV apps, together with a consumer base that is highly fragmented and keen on ‘digital snacking’.
The information shared, views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the scope of knowledge and views of The Indian Television Group, its affiliates, or its employees.
MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.
If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.
What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.
At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.
When OTT finally understood the time problem
For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”
That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.
What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.
Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:
* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing
* Completion rates continued to slide
* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer
At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.
Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.
Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.
There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.
By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.
This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.
In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.
Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.
Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift
ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.
From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.
What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:
* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle
While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.
Why audiences started responding differently
One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.
What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.
On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.
A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:
* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day
This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.
Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.
2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality
The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.
Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:
* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?
This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.
Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.
Failures Became Visible Faster
2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.
Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.
Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.
Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.
The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.
OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit
Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.
OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.
Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.
That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.
What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry
By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:
* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego
Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.
Looking Ahead
Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.
Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.
Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.
2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
MUMBAI: The lights went out on Indian advertising this Diwali. Piyush Pandey, the wordsmith who turned bus rides and roadside tea into unforgettable campaigns, died on Friday aged 70. Just four months earlier, at the Emvies awards in Mumbai, veterans had touched his feet for blessings while young hopefuls queued for selfies. He looked frail but smiled through every encounter. Humility was his signature; genius was his secret.
Pandey never claimed special talent. His gift was simpler and rarer: he kept his eyes open. The famous Fevicol advertisement—a Jaisalmer bus groaning under passengers clinging to every inch—came from a real sighting. The magic was slapping a Fevicol poster on the back of the bus. “Keep your eyes open, keep your ears to the ground and have a heart willing to accept,” he told newcomers at Ogilvy. It wasn’t a slogan. It was scripture.
He joined Ogilvy & Mather in 1982 at 27, after failing at cricket, tea tasting and construction. When Mani Iyer, who headed the agency, introduced him to me as creative director in the late 1980s, Pandey’s deep, soft voice belied a fierce passion for the craft. Like Roda Mehta, who ran media at Ogilvy, he was generous with his time, patiently explaining the thought behind many a campaign to me. Those campaigns moved hundreds of thousands of crores worth of products off shelves over their lifespans.
His method was observation turned into emotion. The Dum Laga Ke Haisha Fevicol spot was originally made for a smaller brand called Fevitite. The Parekhs, who owned Pidilite, told him the ad was too good to waste. Reshoot it for Fevicol, they urged. He did. That single decision spawned a series of award-winning campaigns and turned Fevicol into the category itself.
His philosophy was disarmingly simple: love life. “Whether you are sipping tea from a roadside vendor or in a five-star hotel, whether you are travelling by second class or in a Mercedes-Benz,” he would say. Great ideas came from loving all of it—the chaos, the mundane, the sublime. “Be open to accepting ideas from the world. Be open to sharing ideas with the world. Learn to talk but most importantly also learn to listen.”
Pandey despised lazy advertising. Technology for its own sake was pointless; celebrities without ideas were useless. “Many TVCs are pathetic these days when they use celebrities. They are made very lazily,” he once said. For him, the idea came first. Technology could enhance it; fame could amplify it. But without a core truth, it was just expensive noise.
He believed consumers, not suits or pony-tailed creatives, made advertising great. “It’s when he or she accepts the product and emotionally bonds with it, the product becomes a brand,” he said. His advice to brand managers was blunt: stop being salesmen. Build brands, not just products.
I lost touch with him for decades as I went about building the indiantelevision.com group and all its ancillary services. Journalism and writing as I used to practice when I was younger was relegated to the background. It was during the pandemic that I reached out to him and requested him to spare some time for an online interview. To my surprise, he remembered me and he readily agreed. It was an interesting conversation about how Ogilvy was serving clients during the pandemic and how its creative edge was being maintained. We had agreed we would speak for 30 minutes, but the conversation went on for an hour. It was peppered with Pandey-isms. But that was the last time we spoke at length to each other, though we said hello to each other at advertising industry get-togethers which I rarely attended. Sadly, for me.
The man who taught India to watch, listen and love has gone silent. But his voice echoes still—in every vernacular tagline, every slice-of-life commercial, every campaign that dares to see India as it truly is. Pandey didn’t just sell products. He gave an entire nation permission to speak in its own accent, to find poetry in the everyday, to believe that the roadside and the boardroom could meet and make magic.
The lights dimmed this Diwali, but the spark he lit—built on observation, fuelled by empathy, sustained by love—will burn for generations. That’s not advertising. That’s immortality.
MUMBAI: Once, they blazed across the Indian media landscape with the swagger of pioneers. Entrepreneur-led behemoths like Subhash Chandra’s Zee Entertainment, Kalanithi Maran’s Sun TV, Prannoy Roy’s NDTV, and Raghav Bahl’s Network18 weren’t just market leaders — they were institutions, holding their own even as foreign giants circled hungrily.
Today, those stars are fading. Some have already fallen.
Network18 and TV18 are now firmly in the grip of Reliance Industries and Disney Star. NDTV, long a bastion of editorial independence, is under the control of the Adani Group. Its founders — Roy and Radhika — have exited stage left, their names now relics of an era that once prized journalistic idealism.
Zee, once the crown jewel of Indian broadcasting, is barely hanging on. The Chandra family — once majority owners — now clutch a meagre four-odd per cent stake. It’s a dramatic fall from grace fuelled by Subhash Chandra’s ill-advised adventures into infrastructure. To bankroll these forays, he pledged Zee shares, opening the gates to lenders who came calling. The result: a sharp dilution of promoter ownership and a credibility crisis. The failed merger with Sony’s Indian arm, Culver Max Entertainment, only added insult to injury — scuppered reportedly due to concerns about Zee’s financial hygiene. A company once viewed as squeaky clean had its reputation muddied.
Sun TV, the fourth of the old guard, is also showing cracks. Helmed with iron discipline by Kalanithi Maran, it long stood as a symbol of stability. But the facade is now under strain. A family feud has burst into public view, with brother Dayanidhi Maran accusing Kala of wresting control of Sun TV through backdoor share acquisitions. Legal notices have flown, regulatory filings issued, and the company insists all was above board. Still, some reputational damage has been done — and the gossip mills are churning.
The result is a media map being redrawn in real time. Where once these founders shaped the narrative, today they’re either sidelined, embattled, or ousted. And as corporate titans and conglomerates take over, the question is whether passion-led media can survive in an era of balance sheets, bottom lines, and boardroom power plays.
India’s media isn’t short on ambition. But nostalgia alone won’t stop the sun from setting on yesterday’s giants.
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