eNews
GALSNGEAR announces 2024 NAB Show activities
Mumbai: #GALSNGEAR, a movement to bring parity to women in media and entertainment, announced its lineup of activities at the 2024 NAB Show, 13-17 April, in Las Vegas. #GALSNGEAR will co-host a variety of networking and educational sessions to boost technical skills, opportunities, and fellowship for women in the industry. As always, the activities will focus on the four pillars of #GALSNGEAR’s “tequity” equation: tequity = visibility + access + upskilling x a community of support. New this year is the organization’s first in-the-cloud live production from the NAB Show floor.
“At GALSNGEAR, we aim to make sure tequity catches fire and spreads throughout the industry, and our efforts will be on full display at NAB Show,” said #GALSNGEAR founder Amy DeLouise. “We’re fortunate to have support from an ever-growing number of media companies and other allies, who are sharing their expertise and resources and sparking new conversations that advance equity in the industry.”
During the NAB Show this year, #GALSNGEAR will partner with Chyron to host its annual Student Production Intensive, gathering volunteer mentors skilled in camera work, lighting, graphics, switching, engineering, and live production to collaborate with students from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Together, they will produce three hours of live-streamed programming featuring insightful interviews with prominent women and innovators in the tech sphere. As they produce the show, called “Tequity Talk at NAB Show, powered by #GALSNGEAR and Chyron LIVE,” students will get to know the wide range of job opportunities in every industry vertical. At the same time, they’ll gain hands-on experience with Chyron’s new in-the-cloud Chyron LIVE software, cameras from Blackmagic Design, production equipment from LensRentals, cutting-edge communications systems from Riedel, storage solutions from Perifery, and remote collaborative editing software from Scenery.
“We’re excited to bring students into a diverse and supportive volunteer team comprising industry frontrunners and leading-edge technologies as we create a unique case study in live and remote production inside the NAB Show experience,” said #GALSNGEAR program director Danilda Martinez.
The #GALSNGEAR 2024 NAB Show schedule is as follows:
Sunday, April 14, 4 p.m. — Tech Talk: Spotlight on Virtual Production — #GALSNGEAR will present a Tech Talk in the Connect Zone Theater, followed by a Happy Hour in the Connect Zone Conversation Corner.
Monday, April 15, 11 a.m.-Noon and 3-4 p.m. – Tequity Talk at NAB Show, powered by #GALSNGEAR and Chyron LIVE at the Chyron booth, SL2238.
7:30-9:30 p.m. — Networking Party — #GALSNGEAR will host its annual, always-popular off-site networking party co-hosted with HPA Women in Post, SVGW, and the Emma Bowen Foundation.
Details and RSVP here.
Tuesday, April 16, 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. — The #GALSNGEAR CONNECT Women’s Leadership Summit in West Hall meeting rooms W208-209 will feature a keynote conversation with Samira Bakhtiar, general manager of media, entertainment, games, and sports at Amazon Web Services. There will be a deep-dive workshop on how to build one’s professional brand, and a panel of leaders will explore their career journeys in media and technology. Moderated by Nikki Bethel, president and CEO of Emma Bowen Foundation, panelists will include Kylee Peña, senior product marketing manager for professional editorial, Adobe; and Danielle Stocki, project manager, graphics production, Fox Sports.
Tuesday, April 16, Noon-1 p.m. — Lunchtime Panel — The #GALSNGEAR CONNECT Women’s Leadership Summit will conclude with a joint SVGW and #GALSNGEAR Lunch Panel on “The Future of Story: Tech Trends and Audience Engagement.” It will include innovators across sports and entertainment. Moderated by Andrea Berry, executive vice president of operations, Telemundo; panellists Michelle Munson, CEO, Eluvio; Barbara Lange, principal and CEO, Kibo121; and Patti Fallick, managing director, broadcast, USTA, will discuss the latest tools and strategies for audience engagement.
These NAB Show 2024 activities follow last year’s launch of the #GALSNGEAR Tequity Hub, a one-stop shop for women seeking connection. The Tequity Hub hosts monthly conversations on both technical and career topics, as well as upskilling resources, job postings, and beta-testing opportunities.
Sponsors for #GALSNGEAR events throughout the NAB Show are Amazon Web Services, Blackmagic Design, Dell Technologies, NVIDIA, Chyron, Adobe, Perifery, Digital Anarchy, and Flanders Scientific.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
