KadhaiShorts wants Tamil's serial habit on your phone

Karan Dayanidhi Maran has launched KadhaiShorts, billed as Tamil Nadu’s first micro-drama platform, and the pitch is unusually direct about what it is copying: the daily-serial habit that Tamil television spent decades building, now cut into two-minute vertical episodes made for a phone screen.

The format is the one that has exploded globally over the last couple of years, short, cliffhanger-driven episodic series shot for mobile and binged in commute-sized chunks. KadhaiShorts calls its version “Kutti Serials,” and that name is the whole strategy. South Indian audiences already know how to follow a story across hundreds of short installments; the bet is that they will keep doing it on a Rs 20 pay-per-series app instead of a 9pm television slot.

The platform opens with a curated lineup of Tamil originals across six genres and says it has more than 100 in production, with a target of 10 new vertical dramas a month. Tamil comes first; Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Malayalam and Bengali are promised by the end of the financial year. The Rs 20 entry price is the other lever, pitched as low enough to pull in viewers who would never commit to a monthly subscription.

“Audience behaviour has already changed. The industry is now catching up to that shift,” said Karan Dayanidhi Maran, who runs the venture under the Maran Group as its vice chairman and KadhaiShorts’ founder. “We are not entering this space to participate. We are entering it to lead. We are ruthless about standards, ruthless about originals, and ruthless about building long-term cultural impact.” CEO Sabarish Venkat framed the same idea more plainly: television built shared viewing inside a household, and mobile is now building private viewing inside a single person’s day.

Alongside the app, the group launched KadhaiClub, a training and community arm aimed at people who want to write, act, shoot, edit or direct for the vertical format, which has its own grammar and little in common with how features are shot. It already claims over 12,000 members. By March 2027, KadhaiShorts says it wants to bring on more than 200 professionals and open over 4,000 roles across creative and production work, with a knock-on effect it puts at 10,000 indirect livelihoods.

The money question sits underneath all of it. Beyond the per-series fee, KadhaiShorts says it is chasing brand integrations written into the stories themselves rather than ads that interrupt them, which is the part of the plan that will decide whether a Rs 20 app can pay for 10 new shows every month.