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Planetcast takes media to the cloud with cutting-edge AI at NAB 2025
MUMBAI: Planetcast Media Services is set to make waves at NAB Show 2025 in Las Vegas, unveiling a suite of AI-driven, cloud-first innovations designed to streamline content workflows and supercharge media monetisation. As the industry grapples with rising complexities, the company’s unified Nexc platform promises a seamless, cost-effective solution for broadcasters, streamers, and content owners.
“NAB Show is where the media industry’s future takes shape, and at Planetcast, we’re delivering the agility, intelligence, and cost-efficiency that broadcasters, streamers, content owners, and rightsholders need to thrive,” says Planetcast Media Services CEO Sanjay Duda. “From cloud-native playout and IP-based distribution to AI-powered content prep and metadata automation, our integrated solutions suite ensures seamless content management, delivery, and monetization across every platform and screen.”
At the core of Planetcast’s NAB 2025 showcase is NexC, an end-to-end, cloud-first media content supply chain orchestration platform designed to streamline workflows and maximise efficiency. NexC seamlessly integrates content supply chain management, from ingestion to archival, ensuring smooth processing. Its hybrid cloud playout offers flexible, scalable, and ultra-responsive solutions for live and linear content, while its robust IP-based distribution enables software-defined delivery for both live and on-demand media.
The platform also enhances post-production and compliance services with AI-powered content quality control, metadata enrichment, subtitling, and localisation. Additionally, Nexc unlocks new revenue streams for content owners through white-label OTT and FAST channel solutions, solidifying its role as a game-changer in modern media management.
At the heart of Planetcast’s showcase is Nexc, a next-gen media content orchestration platform that integrates cloud-based playout, IP-driven distribution, AI-powered content QC, and white-label OTT solutions.
Planetcast is set to unveil major enhancements to its NexC solutions suite at NAB Show 2025, introducing cutting-edge innovations in sports playout, AI-driven content processing, and postproduction. Cloudx-Turbo, an ultra-responsive sports playout solution, delivers real-time content automation, AI-generated highlights for multi-platform distribution, and dynamic ad insertion for maximised monetisation. The company’s AI-powered content supply chain automation now features advanced metadata extraction, automated segmentation, and compliance enhancements to streamline content prep while ensuring cultural and regulatory adherence.
Additionally, PlanetPost, Planetcast’s first collaboration with Postudio, brings AI-optimised postproduction capabilities, including customisable workflows, high-precision colour grading, Dolby Atmos audio, and a cloud-native platform for seamless collaboration. These advancements reinforce Planetcast’s commitment to transforming media workflows with efficiency, intelligence, and scalability.
With fully managed services integrated into its offering, Planetcast ensures clients not only have cutting-edge tech but also the operational support to maximise efficiency.
“The reality is that, while media companies love great technology, they increasingly need tech tightly integrated with managed services to stay competitive,” said Planetcast Media Services EVP Mark Johns. “Our customers are choosing Planetcast over Software-as-a-Service-only providers because we don’t just sell, we operate it. The success of our service model in Asia and beyond demonstrates clearly that managed services can drive significant cost efficiencies.”
As the industry looks to future-proof its content supply chains, Planetcast invites media professionals to Booth #W3657 at NAB 2025 for an exclusive look at how Nexc can redefine their distribution and monetisation strategies.
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.
