iWorld
CASBAA forms ‘Coalition Against Piracy,’ hires content protection veteran Neil Gane
MUMBAI: CASBAA has announced the formation of the Coalition Against Piracy (CAP), a major initiative to coordinate industry resources in the fight against rampant content theft.
It has appointed Neil Gane, an industry veteran in content protection, as the general manager of CAP. Gane will direct CAP enforcement actions to disrupt, diminish and dismantle pirate enterprises across the region.
The CAP includes leading video content creators and distributors in Asia. Members are: beIN Sports, CASBAA, The Walt Disney Company, Fox Networks Group, HBO Asia, NBCUniversal, Premier League, Turner Asia-Pacific, A&E Networks, Astro, BBC Worldwide, Media Partners Asia, National Basketball Association, PCCW Media, Sony Pictures Television Networks Asia, True Visions, TV5MONDE, and Viacom International Media Networks.
CASBAA chief policy officer John Medeiros said, “One of CASBAA’s primary missions is to bring our members together to join the global fight against content theft. That’s what we are doing in establishing the CAP. CAP will focus on addressing the growing threat of illicit streaming devices (ISDs) and apps, which facilitate massive piracy of movies, sports, TV series and other creative video content. This does great harm to the content creation and distribution industries in Asia, as well as the millions of people who work in the creative economy around the world.”
Gane said, “The Asia Pacific region has some of the worst rates of online piracy in the world.” Formerly with the Hong Kong Police, he has worked on content protection issues for more than a dozen years. He noted that the unprecedented growth in delivery of legal creative content over global broadband networks is being undermined by a surge in the sale of TV boxes with pre-loaded infringing applications.
Online video and broadband distributions have the potential to be a massive economic growth engine in Asia with analysts forecasting market growth of more than 20 per cent over the next five years, benefiting consumers and creators of quality video content within Asia and around the world. But, this growth potential is threatened by piracy.
In the past two years, there have been many new roll-outs of online content services across the Asia Pacific region, by existing players as well as new ones. Unfortunately, the likelihood of success for legitimate online content suppliers is severely reduced by online access to pirated content, resulting in the expectation of many consumers to get “something for nothing.”
“The prevalence of ISDs across Asia is staggering. The criminals who operate the ISD networks and the pirate websites are profiting from the hard work of talented creators, seriously damaging the legitimate content ecosystem as well as exposing consumers to dangerous malware”, said Gane.
Medeiros said, “Current legal frameworks are not adequate to handle this newly-enabled crime.” “Consumers are offered huge content bundles from overseas as if they were legal. But, receiving stolen content is wrong, and the fundamental purpose of an ISD network – with an innocent-looking box as its home node – is to monetise this redistribution of content without any recompense to those who worked to produce it.”
“This is a highly organised transnational crime,” agreed Gane, “with criminal syndicates profiting enormously at the expense of consumers as well as content creators.”
Mitigating the piracy threat requires international cooperation, added Medeiros, and CASBAA has established CAP to provide added support for the content and distribution companies in the worldwide fight against piracy. CAP intends to join hands with similar initiatives underway in other parts of the world, including with the newly-formed Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) and in Europe where a separate coalition of broadcasters and content creators initiated by BBC and the Motion Picture Association has made great strides in information sharing and coordination.
CASBAA CEO Christopher Slaughter said, “We are excited about the launch of CAP in Asia to enhance collaboration between different segments of the industry – distributors, aggregators, and creators – and to complement the other country-specific and global initiatives in place and starting to show results. Collaboration is key and we look forward to the success of this new program.”
CAP will be launched officially at the forthcoming CASBAA Convention 2017, 6-8 November, at Studio City Macau, as a highlight of its robust policy and anti-piracy conference track.
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.
