iWorld
Broadpeak to showcase mobile-first CDN Solution at Mobile World Congress 2022
Mumbai: Broadpeak has announced that it will exhibit the latest content delivery network (CDN) innovations with customers and partners, face to face, at Mobile World Congress 2022.
At the show, Broadpeak will highlight its mobile-first CDN solution that optimises video streaming over mobile — in particular, 5G — networks, ensures an exceptional quality of experience (QoE) for subscribers on every screen, and enhances the energy efficiency of streaming, said the c
Company in a statement.
“Video consumption on mobile devices has seen explosive growth over the last few years, and service providers need efficient solutions for delivering video services over mobile networks, including 5G,” said Broadpeak CEO Jacques Le Mancq. “Broadpeak is leading the way to the next generation of video streaming with a powerful, environmentally sustainable CDN solution. We look forward to showcasing our expertise in video streaming over 4G and 5G networks at Mobile World Congress.”
Broadpeak will show advanced functionalities and far-edge cloud capabilities for 5G streaming to help video service providers deliver an outstanding experience to mobile, fixed wireless, and wireline access users, said the statement.
Demonstrations will include:
Network-controlled ABR streaming: Broadpeak’s S4Streaming significantly improves video streaming QoE in mobile networks, with network-controlled adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming technology that handles bandwidth measurement and video segment selection on the server-side. At Mobile World Congress 2022, Broadpeak will showcase how S4Streaming allows operators to take control over video streaming for various use cases, such as mobile traffic peaks, fixed wireless access, and low-latency content.
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) and deep edge caching: Broadpeak offers far-edge cloud CDN capabilities dedicated to mobile and 5G streaming. At Mobile World Congress, Broadpeak will demo innovative edge caching functionalities, such as 5G and MEC integration, multicast ABR in contribution mode, and edge CDN orchestration (dynamic caching VNF/CNF placement). By streaming video content from the far edge of the mobile and 5G network, service providers can deliver low-latency video streams, reduce congestion, and provide faster startup times, all without rebuffering.
Maximising the Value of 5G Networks
Broadpeak’s mobile-first CDN allows service providers to keep costs under control while also maximising the value of their 5G network. With Broadpeak’s solution, communication service providers can increase the value of their 5G CDN by offering a ‘smart pipe’ to third-party service providers for the delivery of direct-to-consumer content with a premium quality of experience. Broadpeak’s solution leverages state-of-the-art open caching, geo-targeted ad insertion, and multicast ABR technologies on display at Mobile World Congress 2022.
Bringing Energy Efficiency to Streaming
Broadpeak’s advanced CDN enables service providers to build more environmentally sustainable video delivery networks. With Broadpeak’s sustainable approach to video streaming, service providers can drastically reduce power consumption. Broadpeak’s CDN leverages multicast transmission and platform mutualisation technology (multi-purpose and multi-tenancy), virtualisation (dynamic placement), and power-efficient software/hardware integration.
Broadpeak will also be part of:
1. AWS Partner Village, with Broadpeak highlighting how it helps content providers deliver the most engaging streaming experiences on 5G with AWS Wavelength.
2. Intel’s Front Row Experiences, with Broadpeak showing how its advanced CDN can run on a multipurpose telco edge cloud platform.
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.
