eNews
Skyesports Masters rope in AMD and Microsoft as Powered By Sponsors
Mumbai: Skyesports, South Asia’s leading esports tournament organizer, has onboarded AMD and Windows 11 as powered by sponsors to enhance India’s first-ever franchised esports tournament, the Skyesports Masters.
Scheduled to take place in Mumbai, India in front of a huge live audience, Skyesports Masters will witness eight franchised teams competing in CS: GO to become the ultimate masters. The groundbreaking tournament is set to make history as India’s biggest gaming event ever, with a record-breaking prize pool of Rs. 2 Crores.
AMD is a multinational semiconductor company renowned for its impressive range of graphics cards. Through its cutting-edge technology and products, AMD has set the bar for gaming performance and power energy, making it the perfect partner for Skyesports Masters to elevate the gameplay of the tournament to unparalleled heights.
Commenting on the sponsorship, AMD India marketing head Mukesh Bajpai said, “We are excited to connect with fans and the esports community through India’s biggest gaming tournament, Skyesports Masters. We look forward to offering an immersive gaming experience with AMD’s latest technology and powerful range of gaming products to a wide audience not only in India but beyond as well.”
Microsoft Windows 11, the world’s leading operating system, will be powering Skyesports Masters to not only enhance the visual experience of the tournament but also provide a seamless gaming experience to the athletes through its advanced features.
Microsoft India head of modern work Bhaskar Basu said, “We are thrilled to be a part of India’s first franchised esports league, the Skyesports Masters. Gaming has always been an integral part of the Windows experience. Windows 11 offers an immersive gaming experience to players with technologies like Auto HDR, Direct Storage, and more. We look forward to the Skyesports Masters in Mumbai, to bring the joy of gaming to players across India.”
The Skyesports Masters offers the ideal platform for both brands to showcase their products to a highly engaged gaming audience and these high-profile associations are a testament to the grand magnitude of the tournament.
Skyesports founder and CEO Shiva Nandy said, “We are thrilled to have AMD and Windows 11 with us for India’s biggest gaming tournament, the Skyesports Masters. We need to provide the players with the best infrastructure for competing in the league, and with the power of AMD and Windows 11 have aced that. The franchised esports league includes a long LAN event in Mumbai offering brands an ideal place to not only show their products but also connect with the audience on the ground as well.”
The Skyesports Masters is set to kick off next month with the gaming cafe qualifiers. These qualifiers will take place in more than 20 cities across the country to recognize the best CS: GO talent and usher in a revival for the title from the grassroots level.
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
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.
