Micro-dramas make a leap from China to India, fueling a new content race

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The big story

Recent friendly overtures aside, India does not always see eye to eye with China. But when it comes to the battle for eyeballs, the country’s entertainment industry has taken a leaf out of the Chinese playbook.

Micro-dramas, or 90 seconds to two-minute videos, loaded with hooks and wild plots, surpassed box office collections in China last year, building a near $7 billion industry, and that trend has made its way into India.

This won’t be the first time a Chinese content format has gained traction in its neighboring country.

ByteDance’s TikTok had seen soaring popularity in India, with millions in the country hooked to its short-video format, before the app was banned in 2020. Within weeks of the ban, Meta’s Instagram launched Reels in India and is now a leading platform for user-generated, short-format content in the country.

As popular Chinese apps are still banned in India, streaming platforms, local production houses and short-video apps backed by private equity and venture capital firms view micro dramas as the next wave of content that drives user engagement.

They are pulling up their socks and investing in building bite-sized serialized content libraries, not to be left behind in the race to master this new video format.

Take Bengaluru-based ShareChat, whose founders launched short-video platform Moj for regional content after TikTok was banned. Between ShareChat and Moj they have 200 million-plus users, Manohar Charan, co-founder and chief financial officer at ShareChat, told CNBC. Instagram had over 480 million Indian users as of October 2025, according to Statista.

Five months ago, ShareChat doubled down on the micro-drama space and launched QuickTV. Unlike Moj, which offers user-generated content and ad-supported micro-dramas, QuickTV publishes videos from professional production houses and comes with a subscription model.

“We have 40 million users watching micro-drama content per month,” Charan told CNBC.

Indian micro-dramas are estimated to be the fastest-growing segment in the country’s $2.4 billion gaming and interactive media sector, according to a report by market research company Redseer and venture capital firm Bitkraft. The sector is expected to grow to $7.8 billion by 2030, with the nascent micro-drama space estimated to become a billion-dollar industry over the next five years.

“This format [micro-dramas] is designed for today’s fast-scrolling, snackable moments, while unlocking opportunities for a new wave of creators across India’s vibrant creative ecosystem,” Amogh Dusad, director and head of content at Amazon MX Player, said in a post on LinkedIn earlier this year.

To capitalize on the micro-drama opportunity, over the past six months, Amazon MX has launched Fatafat, Indian…