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MIPTV announces call for entries for the 2024 MIP SDG Award
Mumbai: MIPTV announced a Call for Entries for the 2024 MIP SDG Award, the annual honour established in association with the United Nations to recognise the contribution of companies and individuals within the international audiovisual sector to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Recipients will be presented live on stage in Cannes at the 61 editions of the spring international television market (8 – 10 April 2024).
Created in 2020 in support of the UN’s Decade of Action campaign, to which the SDGs are central, the MIP SDG AWARD provides an international platform to showcase how progress towards these goals can be accelerated on or off the air, through editorial, campaigns and business practices. Previous winners include A+E Networks, ACT, Junk Kouture, Sky, and last year’s recipients, acclaimed natural history producers Silverback.
Two awards will be presented in 2024, the MIP SDG Award, and the MIP SDG Innovation Award, the latter in recognition of originality in endeavour or action. For the first time, applications will be accepted from organisations or individuals whose activity delivers against one or more of the SDGs for either award. The seventeen SDGs encompass areas including the reduction of poverty and inequality and improvement of health and education, in addition to tackling climate change and the preservation of the planet’s oceans and forests. Submission forms including full criteria, terms and conditions can be found here.
The deadline for entry is 2 February 2024.
Selections will be determined by a jury comprised of social responsibility experts and representatives from RX France. The presentation of both categories will take place in a special session showcasing the recipient’s work within the conference programme at the forthcoming MIPTV market.
The MIP SDG Award forms part of RX France’s ongoing commitment to the United Nations’ SDG Media Compact. Founded in 2018, the alliance of media and entertainment companies now numbers over 450 members from 160 countries who pledge to leverage their respective resources to amplify and accelerate progress towards achieving the SDGs.
“Television inspires change like no other medium, and the need to accelerate change globally has never been more evident,” said MIPTV director Lucy Smith. “The MIP SDG Award provides a platform to highlight purpose and ingenuity in these increasingly critical areas to an international audience of peers to then admire, learn from and emulate in their own way.”
United Nations Regional Information Center deputy director Caroline Petit added, “This MIP Award calls for more diversity in creative content related to the Sustainable Development Goals. It will encourage the international media industry to increase sustainable business practices on and off-screen. The MIP SDG Award will shed light on existing impactful media initiatives and audiovisual programming aligned with the global goals as well as inspire more companies and industry professionals to create attractive SDG-driven content.”
The three-day international MIPTV exhibition last year welcomed more than 5500 delegates from over 80 countries. The 2024 edition includes a pre-opening weekend (6-7 April) featuring extended MIPDOC and MIPFORMATS strands, creating ‘the biggest weekend in Unscripted’ in Cannes with documentary, factual and format communities gathering for two days of networking, screenings, showcases and deal-making. International Series Festival Canneseries will again run alongside MIPTV from 5-10 April 2024.
Award FAQ’s can be found here.
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.
