iWorld
New York Comic Con 2022: Prime Video announces programming block and consumer experience
Mumbai: Amazon’s OTT platform Prime Video has announced its programming block and consumer experience for this year’s New York Comic Con, which takes place next month from 6-9 October. The lineup will feature live, in-person panels from returning and new series, including The Legend of Vox Machina, Good Omens, The Wheel of Time, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and The Peripheral.
The panels will offer fans a chance to hear directly from some of their favourite Prime Video talent through moderated Q&As, as well as the opportunity to be among the first to see exclusive first looks and never-before-seen footage from a stellar lineup of Prime Video titles. The panels will also be livestreamed at www.thepopverse.com, prior to being made available for Vod playback to ReedPop members and digital ticket holders.
Prime Video panels at New York Comic Con:
The Legend of Vox Machina
The executive producers and cast of The Legend of Vox Machina will offer a sneak peek of what’s to come in the animated series’ highly anticipated second season. Based on the characters and adventures of Critical Role’s first live-streamed tabletop role-playing game campaign, this fantasy adventure quickly grew into an animated sensation. After saving the realm from evil and destruction at the hands of the most terrifying power couple in Exandria, Vox Machina is faced with saving the world once again—this time, from a sinister group of dragons known as the Chroma Conclave.
Good Omens
In 2019, Aziraphale and Crowley helped save the world from the apocalypse. Next year, they’ll return to solve a mystery that takes in all of heaven and hell. It’s time for a celebration of all things Good Omens, and some of the creators and cast will return to New York Comic Con for a fan Q&A.
The Wheel of Time and The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power
Prime Video presents a programming block for fantasy fans. The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power take to New York Comic Con’s Empire Stage for back-to-back panels with series talent from each show.
The Wheel of Time: Following their season-long adventure that culminated in a showdown with The Dark One and the shocking reveal of The Dragon Reborn’s identity, the cast and creative team behind The Wheel of Time will assemble in New York for their first in-person Comic Con. Join series stars and showrunner Rafe Judkins as they reflect back on their season one journey, both on and off screen, as well as drop a few hints of what audiences can anticipate from the hotly anticipated second season.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The cast of the series welcomes all fans at New York Comic Con to join them for a panel discussion about the first seven episodes of this critically acclaimed show. Beginning in a time of relative peace, The Rings of Power follows an ensemble cast of characters. They confront the reemergence of evil in middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the misty mountains, to the forests of Lindon, to the island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.
The Peripheral
Fans can also immerse themselves in the world of The Peripheral. The series stars Chloë Grace Moretz, Jack Reynor, Gary Carr, T’Nia Miller, and JJ Feild, as well as executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, creator and showrunner Scott B. Smith, and director Vincenzo Natali, as they give fans a first look at sci-fi thriller The Peripheral. The series centres on Flynne Fisher (Moretz), a woman trying to hold together the pieces of her broken family in a forgotten corner of tomorrow’s America. Flynne is smart, ambitious, and doomed. She has no future until the future comes calling for her. The Peripheral is based on William Gibson’s best-selling novel of the same name, and gives viewers a hallucinatory glimpse into the fate of mankind – and what lies beyond.
Prime Video consumer experience: Fans can also visit the New York Comic Con show floor to experience Forever Fab, a 3D print shop storefront inspired by the upcoming Prime Video original sci-fi series The Peripheral. Forever Fab invites attendees to step into the world of 2032 and see the future printed before their eyes, only to find that the future may have something else in store for them.
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.
