Sometime in early 2024, Kunj Sanghvi, then Vice President of KUKU, the podcast and audiobook platform, was traveling around Korea and China.
“We saw the adoption of reels and YouTube stories — a lot of YouTube traffic was now going to shorts, instead of horizontal videos,” Sanghvi notes.
They noticed the audio platform was getting engagement in the middle of the day, unlike streaming and television.
In November 2024, they “committed to microdramas”, dubbing Chinese and Korean content that they got rights for.
“We realised we had to curate this format, by working on the storyline and the structure of the microdrama,” Sachin Singh, Head of KukuTV, tells THR India.
Sometime in early 2024, Kunj Sanghvi, then Vice President of KUKU, the podcast and audiobook platform, was traveling around Korea and China. “We went there to learn more about the audio business, but one day, our cab-driver showed us a video of Baahubali (2015) in the format of a microdrama — vertical and broken into two minute episodes with a Korean dub,” Sanghvi tells THR India.
Something had shifted in the public appetite. Back in India, they began experimenting. “We saw the adoption of reels and YouTube stories — a lot of YouTube traffic was now going to shorts, instead of horizontal videos,” Sanghvi notes.
They sniffed around the data, trying to pin down lurking meaning. They noticed the audio platform was getting engagement in the middle of the day, unlike streaming and television. “These were people finding small islands of time, like their lunch break or their commute or in between tasks. We realized we had to own this time. Microdramas supercharged that.”
If Netflix was, as its CEO Ted Sarandos infamously stated, competing with sleep, then, KukuTV was going to own fallow time. Everything is real estate. Everything is competition. Even attention. Even time.
In November 2024, they “committed to microdramas”, dubbing Chinese and Korean content that they got rights for. They tried cutting existing films, like Welcome (2007), into the vertical format—but that did not seem to work. “We realised we had to curate this format, by working on the storyline and the structure of the microdrama,” Sachin Singh, Head of KukuTV, tells THR India. Besides, an entire ecosystem needed to be built from the ground up—from writers, directors and technicians to production partners who could execute the shows per instruction. January 2025 onwards, KukuTV started releasing originals.
