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We are living in a world where content is no longer scarce. There is more news, more videos, more creators, and, AI that can generate almost anything we ask for. But this abundance brings a new challenge: when everyone is creating content, how do you get someone to stop scrolling, pay attention, and come back? On the sidelines of TechSparks 2026, Avinash Mudaliar, Co-founder and CEO of HT Media Labs and the creator of Saregama Carvaan; Deepit Purkayastha, Co-founder and CEO of Inshorts; and GSN Aditya, COO of Eloelo Group, came together for a discussion titled The Format Is the Product: When Content Becomes Infinite. The conversation explored how formats shape the way audiences consume content, what makes a format resonate in an increasingly crowded digital landscape, and why the format itself can be as important as the content it carries. What is the differentiator in all this: the format, distribution, personalisation or the relationship with the consumer? “Actually, the four items you mentioned aren't rivals. They are congruent; they co-exist. And all of them need to be married in a particular combination to get a person to come back. Right now, the problem is not content. Content has become infinite. Time has become finite,” said Mudaliar. He explained that when he was building Carvaan, he had a clear target audience: people who didn't want to open an app, create a playlist, log in, pay, go through the entire rigmarole just to listen, and then go to a search bar and search for a song. Carvaan put in 5,000 songs in a fully digitised, personalised product, without advertising itself as digital. Instead, it recreated the experience of listening to old-time radio, limiting the choices available and allowing listeners to immerse themselves in the music. With OTT Play, the focus was primarily on personalisation, helping users decide what to watch, where to watch it and how. Purkayastha said that when he started Inshorts 12 years ago, people were beginning to consume content on smartphones, but no app was truly innovating on how they consumed news and information on these devices. “Today, people come to us because they want a reliable, factual source of information. They want to stay updated on the world, but they don't want the noise and provocativeness of social media. We are a source reliable enough that they can use it during their digital detox,” he said. For Eloelo, the micro-drama format unlocked the ability to tell many more stories faster and reach a wider audience. “I think people's tastes continue to change, and while there is infinite content, the top 5% is often where most of the eyeballs go. So it comes down to your ability to keep reinventing the story arc, tell new stories, and deliver them through state-of-the-art data science to personalise content so people always see what they want to see,” said Aditya. The role of AI There's a general perception that AI can create everything, so what will audiences actually value? Purkayastha says that while AI platforms are increasingly meeting consumers’ on-demand information needs, people still want real-time updates. “AI can't imagine what's happening at TechSparks right now. Someone has to feed it into the system. That is live content generation, and that is news. Summaries and articles are the collateral that emerge from it. “When an event happens, the question is which sources and distributors will be trusted. Trust becomes the most interesting capital they build, and I think LLM agents will value it too.” Aditya believes AI will accelerate content creation but cannot replace human creativity. “It's a great enabler for people to tell stories, but I don't think it will substitute for human creativity,” he says, pointing out that despite the money and data invested in Hollywood and Bollywood, no deterministic system can predict whether a story will be a hit. “People's tastes continuously change, and their expectations change. That can only be solved by human creativity.” He added that AI would speed up storytelling workflows, while creativity and inspiration would remain human-driven. Trust and verification Mudaliar points to trust and verification as key differentiators in an AI-driven content ecosystem. “There's a very interesting concept we're trying out at HT Tech right now. HT is already a trusted source for most LLMs for India-oriented news and beyond, simply because we've been around for the last 100 years. We take pride in our journalism, and we put out verified stories. We are now building another ecosystem within HT called HT Verify,” he explained. “For example, our team member here is capturing this event, creating a video out of it that will also be made into social content, and writing maybe 3,000 words on it, written to the schema AI LLMs prefer and made citable by the AI. So you are literally training the AI that this content is not only trustworthy, it's also verified and ready for consumption. That results in your content being cited and picked up, and then transmogrified for the user,” he added. For Purkayastha, understanding audiences beyond urban India meant identifying a gap in trustworthy local content. When Inshorts began exploring consumption patterns in smaller cities in 2019, as mobile internet use surged following Jio's arrival, the team realised that local news from smaller towns often went unreported. “We realised that the biggest gap in those markets was that content generation wasn't happening in a trustworthy way,” he says. The company addressed this gap with Public, a platform featuring verified creators who report on their towns and cities. Launched in 2019, it has since reached about 80 million users. For Aditya, micro-drama economics have created opportunities to tell stories for more specific audiences rather than chase mass appeal. With lower production costs and shorter turnaround times, creators can experiment with stories rooted in particular regions and communities. “I no longer have to make storylines that only appeal to a large catchment of people. I can now talk about storylines relevant to, say, a district in Uttar Pradesh, and the P&L still works. So we're now able to tap into Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, each of these,” he said. Mudaliar believes the industry still has a long way to go in designing products for India's diverse linguistic audiences. Despite the emphasis on building for Bharat, he argues, many products continue to draw inspiration from platforms designed primarily for urban consumers. “98% of India consumes in a local language. He doesn't know how to search; he doesn't know how to write in English; he's trying. For him, voice search is the first point of contact because he doesn't know how to type. That's why even Google Maps, even your Uber drivers, use voice. So why aren't we building voice-first products for India?” he asked.
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