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What TRAI’s digital audio rollout recommendations mean for the radio folks?
NEW DELHI: India’s telecom regulator has thrown struggling FM broadcasters a lifeline, recommending a graduated payment structure for digital radio spectrum that defers most costs for a decade while the receiver ecosystem develops.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) proposes auctioning two digital frequencies in each of 13 major cities—including Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Bengaluru—at reserve prices ranging from Rs 20.52 crore to Rs 194.08 crore. Crucially, successful bidders choosing instalment payments would pay nothing for digital spectrum components during the first five years, when device adoption will be negligible.
The phased approach reflects harsh commercial realities. Private FM radio advertising revenues have flatlined at Rs 1,819 crore in 2024-25, barely recovering to 2015-16 levels despite more operational channels. The sector faces mounting competition from music streaming platforms and shifting listener habits.
“The business model of radio broadcasters is primarily driven by advertising revenues, which is closely linked to listener reach,” TRAI notes in recommendations released on 3 October 2025. “Without affordable receivers, broadcasters may have little incentive to adopt digital radio.”
Under the staggered payment plan, analogue spectrum costs would be recovered in equal instalments over 15 years. But digital spectrum fees—representing one-third of total valuation—would be waived entirely for five years, then recovered at one-third rates from years six to ten, and two-thirds rates from years 11 to 15. All payments would protect net present value using State Bank of India’s marginal cost of lending rate, currently 8.75 per cent.
The delay acknowledges brutal adoption timelines. TRAI estimates two years for service rollout, three more for widespread device availability, and another five to reach break-even—consuming two-thirds of the 15-year authorisation period before meaningful returns materialise.
Digital radio allows multiple channels on single frequencies through simulcast transmission—one analogue channel plus three digital channels and one data channel per frequency. But the technology requires new receivers. Mobile handset manufacturers have shown little interest in integration, despite government advisories. Vehicle infotainment systems may take 15 years to reach full penetration given replacement cycles.
The regulator stops short of mandating a specific technology, recommending government choose between HD Radio and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) after consulting industry. “Selection of technology among the two technologies suitable in VHF Band-II for deployment in India…may be done in consultation with the industry, including radio broadcasters and radio receiver manufacturers,” TRAI states.
Both technologies are recognised by the International Telecommunication Union. HD Radio, used in North America, requires 400 kHz bandwidth. DRM needs just 300 kHz and is open-source, avoiding royalty fees. The authority warns against allowing multiple standards, citing interoperability nightmares and market fragmentation.
Existing FM broadcasters could voluntarily migrate to simulcast by paying the difference between auction prices and their proportionate remaining licence fees. A six-month window would follow auctions for migration decisions.
The recommendations tackle infrastructure bottlenecks head-on. Common transmission infrastructure in existing cities cannot accommodate new digital channels. TRAI proposes either broadcaster consortiums or assignment to Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Ltd should create new facilities within three months. Mandatory co-location with government infrastructure would be scrapped.
Prasar Bharati, the public broadcaster, should offer land, tower and transmission infrastructure at concessional rates whilst recovering operational expenses, TRAI adds.
Annual authorisation fees would be set at four per cent of adjusted gross revenue for most cities, dropping to two per cent for three years in northeastern states, Jammu and Kashmir and island territories. The regulator proposes a new category of radio broadcasting infrastructure providers authorised to build and lease facilities commercially.
Controversially, TRAI recommends allowing terrestrial radio streaming without user controls like download or playback. This extends reach globally whilst the authority dismisses potential copyright concerns as beyond its remit, noting broadcasters “shall be subject to Copyright Act, 1957.”
The measured rollout—just two frequencies per city initially—contrasts sharply with July 2025’s disastrous auction, where only 63 of 730 channels found buyers across 234 cities. That debacle underscores sector weakness and justifies cautious expansion.
Whether broadcasters bite remains uncertain. The staggered payment plan reduces upfront barriers, but fundamental economics remain challenging. Streaming platforms offer unlimited choice and user control. Digital radio offers better audio quality and emergency alert capabilities, but competes for ears in an increasingly crowded audio landscape.
TRAI’s recommendations now await government action. Implementation timelines are unclear, but the regulator urges swift technology selection before financial bidding begins. The decade-long journey to digital radio viability starts with that choice.
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.
