iWorld
Online video growth zooms across Asia with internet TV consumption: MPA
MUMBAI: In a landscape still dominated by TV, the Asia Pacific online video industry seems to be on a path to double its share of video industry revenue ex-China from 9 per cent in 2017 to 20 per cent by 2023, according to analysis released today by Media Partners Asia (MPA).
The findings will be presented at the APOS Summit (April 24-26), an event for industry leaders in media, telecoms and entertainment, in Bali, Indonesia.
The analysis covers 12 markets: Australia, India, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and six key markets in Southeast Asia, with a focus on consumer and advertiser spend, content costs and market share across key clusters.
MPA executive director Vivek Couto said: “The growth of subscription and ad-supported video services from Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Google will propel these FANG companies to a combined 63 per cent share of Asia Pacific online video revenues ex-China by the end of 2018.
Google-owned YouTube’s dominance is reflected by its 70 to 90 per cent slice of a large and fast-growing online video ad pie in Australia, Japan, Southeast Asia and India. In addition, Amazon and Netflix have scaled quickly with subscription video offerings in Australia, India and Japan but have a long way to go in Southeast Asia and Korea. There’s also a long runway for more growth in India.
Encouragingly, local and regional players with strong entertainment and sports IP together with, in many instances, large TV businesses, have invested in online video platforms to grab a bigger market share. This is especially true in India, Korea and Japan, although Southeast Asia lags.
The outlook remains in FANG’s favour, however, with its aggregate market share maintained at 62 per cent in 2023. Such scale will dramatically alter growth and investment dynamics across key markets. We see significant upside for local and regional media platforms with attractive IP and strong execution as well as the appetite and patience to invest over the long term across digital video.
Excluded from MPA analysis are potential all-in premium offerings from Disney, 21st Century Fox and Time Warner, which are likely to start gaining traction at some point over the next five years as global media consolidation accelerates.
FANG’s share could also be greater once Amazon Prime Video scales up in Australia and key markets across Southeast Asia. This is not yet included in the assumptions underlying MPA’s analysis.”
Key highlights from the MPA survey include:
FANG vs The Rest
The growth of subscription and ad-supported video services from Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Google will propel the FANG companies to a combined 63 per cent share of Asia Pacific online video revenues ex-China by the end of 2018. Google-owned YouTube’s dominance is reflected by its 70 to 90 per cent slice of a large and fast growing online video ad pie in Australia, Japan, Southeast Asia and India. Amazon and Netflix have scaled quickly with subscription video offerings in Australia, India and Japan but have a long way to go in Southeast Asia and Korea. There’s also a long runway for more growth in India.
Encouragingly, local and regional players with strong entertainment and sports IP and, in many instances, large TV businesses, have invested in online video platforms to grab a bigger market share. This is especially true in India, Korea and Japan although Southeast Asia lags.
According to MPA, YouTube and Facebook combined will account for 72 per cent of online video advertising in Asia Pacific ex-China by 2023, versus 75 per cent at end-2018. In subscription-based online video, Amazon and Netflix’s combined share of the market should reach 35 per cent in 2018 and grow to 37 per cent by the end of 2023, although local and regional platforms are competing for and winning a share of incremental dollars in Australia, India, Japan, Korea and parts of Southeast Asia.
Content Investment
Total content investment in TV and online video across the 12 surveyed markets reached $23.1 billion in 2017, up 6 per cent year on year (yoy). MPA’s analysis includes movies, entertainment and sports. Content investment is expected to scale to $30.1 billion by 2023, a 5 per cent CAGR from 2018. Such growth is largely anchored to new dollars being spent across online video, which will account for 17 per cent of content investment by 2023 versus 10 per cent in 2018. MPA analysis focuses on premium video content creation across TV and OTT but excludes costs associated with the billions of hours being mass produced and uploaded on YouTube.
Content investment on TV is largely anchored to continued growth in sports rights, across Australia and India in particular, entertainment on free TV across Southeast Asia, albeit expanding at a more moderate pace, and pay-TV in India and Korea. Online video’s contribution to total TV and online video content costs will grow markedly in Southeast Asia, rising from 10 per cent to 20 per cent between 2018 and 2023. A similar growth trajectory is evident over the same period in Australia (13 per cent to 26 per cent) and India (10 per cent to 19 per cent).
The Overall Video Industry
Asia Pacific advertising and subscription fees across TV and online video grew 3.9 per cent ex-China in 2017 to reach $60 billion. TV and online media continue to grow at different speeds, as expected, with TV revenues inching up 1.2 per cent in 2017 while online video revenue expanded by 45 per cent to $5.2 billion.
MPA projects that total industry revenues will climb at a 3.8 per cent CAGR over 2018-23 to reach $77 billion by 2023, with online video scaling up by a 16 per cent CAGR to reach $15 billion in net terms by 2023 versus $7.1 billion in 2018. TV will only grow at a 1.8 per cent CAGR over the same period to reach $62 billion by 2023.
By 2023, the largest TV and online video markets in Asia Pacific ex-China will be: Japan ($27 billion), India ($17 billion), Korea ($9.2 billion) and Australia ($8.2 billion). Southeast Asia will contribute $11.1 billion by 2023. India will remain the fastest-growing video market, growing at an average annual rate of more than 8 per cent over 2018-23, followed by Southeast Asia with 5 per cent and Australia at 4.5 per cent.
Online Video
Online video advertising, dominated by YouTube to date, continues to grow at a stellar pace, increasing by 47 per cent in Asia Pacific ex-China to $3.6 billion in 2017 and projected by MPA to climb at a 17 per cent CAGR between 2018-23 to reach $10.7 billion by 2022. Online video subscription fees are growing rapidly from a very low base, up 41 per cent year-on-year in 2017 to reach $1.7 billion and forecast to grow at a 12 per cent CAGR from 2018 to more than $4 billion by 2023.
Japan and Australia will remain the leading markets for online video, contributing more than 55 per cent to Asia Pacific revenues ex-China in 2023. The third-largest market will be India, which will also be the fastest growing with a 26 per cent CAGR over 2018-23, with Southeast Asia the second-fastest with a 21 per cent CAGR over the same period.
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.
