AI Is Sending India’s Microdrama Output Soaring as Algorithms Decide What Gets Seen
AI is accelerating India's microdrama boom, but ShareChat says recommendation algorithms could increasingly decide which shows viewers actually see.
India's microdrama industry is growing so quickly that producing another show may soon become easier than getting viewers to actually see it. Artificial intelligence is lowering production costs and speeding up content creation, while recommendation algorithms are becoming increasingly powerful in deciding which programmes make it onto people's phones.
ShareChat co-founder and chief financial officer Manohar Singh Charan says the growing volume of short drama means platforms will increasingly rely on algorithms to decide what reaches individual viewers. ShareChat operates QuickTV, a dedicated microdrama platform, alongside its short-video service Moj.
Microdramas are serialised fictional shows created primarily for mobile viewing, with episodes often lasting less than two minutes and ending on cliffhangers designed to immediately pull viewers into the next instalment. The format has already become a major entertainment business in China and is now expanding rapidly across India.
The viewing behaviour can be extraordinary when recommendation systems accurately identify what someone wants to watch. Charan says around a quarter of Moj users aren't shown microdrama because the system predicts they aren't interested, while some viewers who respond strongly to recommendations can watch between 90 and 95 episodes in a single day.
ShareChat says it is serving around one billion microdrama episodes every day, illustrating the scale of the competition for attention. As AI makes production faster and cheaper, studios can release more stories and rapidly create variations on formats that have already proved successful.
That creates two very different roles for technology. Generative AI and AI-assisted production tools can reduce the cost and time needed to make the shows, while recommendation algorithms determine which programmes emerge from an increasingly crowded catalogue and reach actual viewers.
The market could become enormous. Industry research estimates India’s microdrama sector could grow from around 23 billion Indian rupees in the 2026 financial year to between 235 billion and 255 billion rupees by 2032. Advertising-supported platforms could eventually reach well over 100 million daily users, showing how quickly short-form drama is moving from an emerging format into a significant part of India’s entertainment industry.
The growth also raises a bigger question for entertainment companies. If AI makes it possible to produce hundreds or thousands of similar dramas increasingly cheaply, the most valuable part of the business may no longer be simply making another programme.
The platforms controlling the recommendation systems could ultimately hold enormous influence over which stories become hits and which disappear almost immediately, even when the difference in production quality between them becomes increasingly small.
