Your Next 2-Minute Drama May Have an AI Co-Director

Micro-dramas are becoming one of India’s fastest-growing digital entertainment formats. The market crossed $300 million in 2025 and is projected to hit $1.5 billion by the end of 2026, according to a report by VC firm Lumikai. 

The bite-sized format of one- to three-minute-long vertical videos, which first gained popularity in China, is now finding a growing audience craving quick entertainment. Behind that boom is artificial intelligence, which is increasingly shaping how these shows are created, produced, and recommended.

From predicting whether a script will keep viewers engaged to generating visuals, dubbing content into regional languages, and dishing personalised recommendations, AI is now part of almost every stage of the micro-drama production process at Indian studios.

Among them are Story TV and JioHotstar, which are exploring how AI can reshape short-form entertainment while keeping human creativity at the centre.

Using AI From Scratch

For Story TV, AI begins working long before cameras start rolling.

The company has built a ‘Script Prediction Engine’, an AI system trained on viewing behaviour from more than 1,000 produced micro-dramas. Before production, the tool analyses the script, predicts audience retention scene by scene, identifies where viewers are likely to drop off, and helps decide whether to green-light it.

“We use AI across the entire content lifecycle,” says GSN Aditya, COO of Story TV.

The goal is to reduce creative risk while helping producers allocate resources more efficiently. Instead of relying only on instinct, creative teams can now look at behavioural insights before producing a show.

AI Across the Production Pipeline

Story TV also applies AI for visual effects, thumbnail generation, localisation, and other creative workflows. In some cases, entire shows are produced using AI.

Earlier this year, Story TV released ‘Yakshini – Dev Hunter ', which it describes as India’s first fully AI-generated Hindi micro-drama. It also created the Hanuman Sundarkand series using its in-house AI stack.

However, Aditya believes AI should be viewed as an assistant rather than a replacement for creative professionals. “Instead, it allows us to scale regional language distribution much faster while maintaining consistency across multiple markets,” he notes.

One area where AI is already making a noticeable difference is localisation.

Traditional dubbing often requires voice actors, recording studios and multiple rounds of editing. Story TV adds AI-powered dubbing and voice generation, which can reduce localisation timelines from days to just a few hours while significantly lowering production costs.

Even so, human artists remain involved because AI-generated voices still require quality checks.

Understanding What Viewers Want

Beyond production, AI also helps platforms understand audience behaviour.

Every day, millions of viewing decisions generate valuable signals about what audiences enjoy, where they lose interest, and which stories encourage binge-watching. Story TV analyses these behavioural patterns to improve both recommendations and future productions.

“The strongest indicators are completion rates, binge behaviour, repeat visits, and session duration,” says Aditya.

Those insights influence more than just recommendations. “They influence both discovery and content creation. Behavioural intelligence increasingly informs decisions much earlier in the process,” he notes.

Still, he stresses that the data does not replace creative judgement. Writers and creators remain responsible for crafting compelling stories.

JioHotstar Sees AI as a Creative Partner

JioHotstar is taking a similar approach, treating it as a tool that expands creative possibilities.

“Our approach is to view AI as a creative enabler rather than a substitute for storytelling, explains Ambuj Kashyap, Executive Vice President - Micro Content, JioStar.

The company says AI can support multiple stages of production, including concept development, storyboarding, CGI, editing, localisation, and post-production. Yet humans remain indispensable.

“The emotional core of a story, its characters, cultural context and narrative choices continue to be driven by human creators”, he adds.

Instead of focusing on specific AI tools, JioHotstar prefers to remain technology-agnostic and adopt whichever technologies best support creators.

The company believes AI will be particularly useful in visually ambitious genres such as mythology, fantasy, and animation, as in its AI-generated series Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, where technology can make large-scale storytelling more accessible.

Changing the Economics of Storytelling

For both companies, AI is not just about reducing production time. It is also making stories possible that may have been too expensive to produce using traditional methods.

Kashyap believes AI allows creators to experiment with ambitious visual worlds without requiring conventional production budgets. AI can help unlock new creative voices, make ambitious narratives more accessible, and encourage experimentation across mythology, fantasy, animation, contemporary stories, and emerging formats.

Story TV shares a similar view. “For us, AI is not a feature. It is becoming a foundational layer of how entertainment businesses will operate in the future,” Aditya notes.

Despite rapid advances in AI, both companies agree on one point: Technology can make production faster, improve recommendations and reduce costs, but it cannot replace storytelling.