iWorld
Broadband subscriber growth picks up in October 2019
BENGALURU: Overall broadband internet subscribers in India grew by 1.866 crore or 2.98 per cent in the month ended 31 October 2019 (Oct-19) from the numbers reported by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India for the month ended 30 September 2019 (Sep-19). TRAI reported 62.542 crore (625.42 million or 6,254.2 lakh) broadband internet subscribers across all segments for Sep-19. This number grew to 64.408 crore (644.08 million or 6,440.8 lakh) in Oct-19 as per the latest numbers published by Trai.
Subscriber growth for Oct-19 was the third highest over a 22-month period starting Jan-18 until Oct-19 in absolute numbers. In percentage terms, Oct-19 saw the ninth highest growth during the same period. Over the period under consideration in the paper, broadband internet subscriber growth has been on a decline as is evident from the black trend line the graph below:
The figure below shows the subscriber growth ranking for the months during the period under consideration in this paper in terms of absolute growth numbers as well as per centage terms.
Trai data reveals that broadband subscribers grew by 1.857 crore (18.57 million or 185.7 lakh) or 3.06 per cent to 62.441 crore in Oct-19 from 60.584 crore (605.84 million or 6,054.8 lakh) in Sep-19 on the Mobiles (Phones and dongles) segment. Wired broadband internet segment grew by 0.007 crore (0.07 million or 0.07 lakh) or 0.37 per cent in Oct-19 to 1.908 crore(19.08 million or 190.8 lakh) from 1.901 crore (19.01 million or 190.1 lakh) in Sep-19. Fixed wireless – WiFi, WiMax, Point to Pont, Radio, Vsat subscribers grew 0.002 crore (0.02 million or 0.2 lakh) or 4.22 per cent to 0.059 crore (0.59 million or 5.9 lakh) in Oct-19 from 0.057 crore (0.57 million or 5.7 lakh) in the previous month.
Please refer to the figure below.
Top 5 Broadband Internet Subscribers
According to Trai data, the top five broadband internet service providers constituted 98.98 per cent market share of the total broadband subscribers at the end of Oct-19. These service providers were Reliance JioInfocom Ltd 36.512 crore (365.12 million or 3,651.2 lakh), Bharti Airtel 13.286 crore (132.86 million or 1,328.6 lakh), Vodafone Idea 11.580 crore (115.80 million or 1,158 lakh), BSNL 2.27 crore (22.27 million or 2,227 lakh) and Atria Convergence 0.149 crore (1.49 million or 14.9 lakh).
Top 5 wireless broadband internet subscribers
As on 31 October, 2019, the top five wireless broadband service providers were Reliance Jio Infocom Ltd with 36.433 crore (364.33 million or 3,643.3 lakh), Bharti Airtel with 13.045 crore (130.45 million or 1,304.5 lakh), Vodafone Idea with 11.578 crore (115.78 million or 1,157.8 lakh), BSNL with 1.364 crore (13.64 million 136.4 lakh) and MTNL with 0.02 crore (0.20 million or 20 lakh) subscribers.
Top 5 wired broadband internet subscribers
As on 31 October, 2019, the top five Wired Broadband Service providers were BSNL with 0.862 crore (8.62 million, 86.2 lakh), Bharti Airtel 0.24 crore (2.40 million or 24 lakh), Atria Convergence Technologies with 0.149 crore (1.49 million or 14.9 lakh), Hathway Cable & Datacom with 0.087 crore (0.87 million or 8.7 lakh) and Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd with 0.079 crore (0.79 million or 7.9 lakh). Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited is a new entrant to the top 5 list in October 2019. It replaced You Broadband which had 0.075 crore (0.75 million or 7.9 lakh) broadband internet subscribers in Sep-19. BSNL and Bharti Airtel Limited both lost wired broadband internet subscribers in Oct-19.
The top five wired broadband internet service providers lost 80,000 subscribers in Oct-19. Since the wired internet broadband subscriber base grew by 70,000 during the same period, other smaller service providers which include MSOs and LCOs must have added 150,000 subscribers in Oct-19.
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.
