Tadka, the Indian mini-drama service giant JioHotstar launched within its app just two months ago, has already crossed 100 million users, the platform said on Thursday. JioHotstar’s aggressive growth and aggressive promotion of this important event indicates that India’s largest live streaming company sees small-cap vertical fantasy as the next mass-market segment.
Launched on April 3 as a dedicated box within the JioHotstar app, Tadka offers mini-dramas shot vertically for phones — with episodes that the company says are 30 to 60 seconds long — covering romance, thrillers, comedy and sports stories in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and other languages. The start menu contains more than 100 original titles. The service is free to watch and ad-supported, and exists alongside the platform’s original long-form programming and live sports.
The timing of the launch probably explains at least some of the service’s explosive start. Tadka went live less than a week after the start of the 2026 season of the Indian Premier League, the professional cricket league that ranks as India’s largest annual broadcast event, and for which JioHotstar holds the exclusive digital rights. During last year’s two-month tournament, the platform attracted a total audience of 652 million viewers, according to the company. Launching a free micro-drama tab along with this traffic gave Tadka a user acquisition path that few startups could dream of.
JioHotstar does not specify what is considered a ‘user’ or disclose numbers of active users. But it says the daily viewing time per viewer has increased five-fold since its launch, more than 42 percent of the viewership comes from users under 24 years of age and that urban centers and tier-II cities in India contribute about 40 percent of the viewing time.
This milestone “marks an even bigger inflection point in the evolution of live streaming,” said Ambuj Kashyap, executive vice president, small content at JioStar, adding: “What we are witnessing is the emergence of premium small content as a meaningful new entertainment category.”
JioHotstar is the streaming arm of JioStar, the $8.5 billion joint venture formed in late 2024 when Walt Disney Co. merged its TV and streaming businesses in India into a new entity with the media assets of Reliance Industries (Reliance and its Viacom18 unit collectively own 63.16 percent, Disney owns 36.84 percent). The combined app, which combines JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar, was launched in February 2025 and has an average monthly user base of 500 million. JioStar Vice President Uday Shankar said last May that the company and its predecessor companies would spend more than $10 billion on content from 2024 to 2026.
Tadka suddenly landed in a crowded field. Local mini-drama services Kuku TV and Story TV have led the category in India — their apps recently outperformed premium players like Netflix, Zee5 and SonyLIV in terms of downloads in Indian app stores — while ZEE5 launched its Bullet vertical last July, Amazon added Fatafat in March, and Yash Raj Films announced a nearly $18 million push into the format. Consultancy firm BDO India expects the daily viewership of mini-dramas in the country to reach 300 million to 500 million people. But the micro-drama revolution is still in its infancy in India — research released in March by Ormax and Meta found that 65 percent of domestic micro-drama viewers only discovered the format over the past year.
So far, Tadka only generates income through advertising. Analysts say a possible next step for JioHotstar could be to channel some user share to the paid tier, as local leader Kuku has started doing, now claiming over 10 million paid subscribers across its apps.
“JioHotstar has certainly made an impressive start here,” says Vivek Kotto, CEO of regional consultancy Media Partners Asia. “But the next steps could be more interesting. How can they maintain the volume of content they need going forward? Are they open to licensing? How will they leverage AI? And what is their long-term monetization strategy?”
