The Future of Micro-Drama in India: Our Investment in Flick TV

Flick TV aspires to become the go-to OTT for micro-drama content, much like how Hotstar has become synonymous with live sports, or Netflix and Prime Video with movies and TV series.

Micro-drama is an emerging (or sunrise) content category in India, and has witnessed unprecedented adoption in China and the U.S. over the past 3-4 years. The format of micro-drama brings together the best of short videos (e.g., Reels, Shorts) and TV series, one that is fast-paced but with emotionally engaging stories and relatable characters. These are a series of 1 to 3-minute episodes in a vertical format, built to be mobile-native. Each season could feature 70-80 episodes, totalling 1.5-2 hours of watchable content.

our investment thesis in Flick TV stands on two beliefs

1. Indian consumers with shorter attention spans will wholeheartedly accept the category

Short video platforms, namely Reels and Shorts, have grown exponentially over the past 4-5 years. However, they often struggle to engage users emotionally, frequently resulting in post-consumption guilt.  Micro-drama emotionally engages these attention-deficit consumers through a coherent storyline and relatable characters.

2. Kushal, Pratik and Sanidhya are the perfect team to build this category for India

Given the size of the prize, we expect this to be a competitive category. In our view, the characteristics of the winning team would include the following, all of which are covered between Kushal, Pratik and Sanidhya. In addition, the team comes from the domain, having worked with PocketFM, Sharechat and EloElo, and shares a strong personal love for content as avid content buffs.

• Strong consumer orientation: A deep understanding of consumer taste and preferences, both stated and latent.
• Content ops muscle: The ability to drive an unbiased and high-velocity content generation engine of Originals, which is key to driving long term retention and monetisation.
• Online customer acquisition and script testing: Competence in driving high-velocity and low-cost customer acquisition, as well as robust consumer testing of scripts to drive high hit-rate of content that enters production.
• Engineering and AI

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