eNews
‘Info & cyber insecurity’ biggest risk in biz ops: Survey
NEW DELHI: Information & cyber insecurity are considered as the biggest risk in 2017, and there has been an increase in the incidence of cyber-attacks and potential espionage on cyber-security in the recent past.
The FICCI – Pinkerton India Risk Survey 2017 says: ‘Information & Cyber Insecurity’ has become more pronounced due to the shift that the nation is undergoing towards digitisation of various assets and services being delivered via internet and mobile platforms; and the ever-present loopholes that hackers breach upon’.
The survey consists of 12 risks that pose the most significant threats to business perception and operations in the country. The new age risks are interconnected and overlap across domains, sectors and geographies. New risks have been identified on the basis of this year’s survey, which include: risk of non-compliance, business investment risk and legal regulatory risk.
The survey says ‘The WannaCry malware incident has been, by far, the worst incident this year in which several systems were attacked, both of the public and the private sectors.’ It stressed the need to create robust security mechanism to address cyber-security challenge.
Intellectual Property (IP) theft climbed a level to the tenth rank this time. India’s position in the US Special 301 list does not put India in the most favourable position. On the issues of counterfeit and piracy of films, music and, software, the illegal activities are still prevalent.
‘Terrorism and Insurgency’ risk rising up two spots from its position last year has been ranked as the second biggest threat to businesses in India this year. India has been featured 16 times in Global Terrorism Index in the list of 10 countries most affected by terrorism for the period 2000-2016. Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) perpetrated by communist terrorist groups remains the most severe terrorist threat. The persistent risk posed by ‘Terrorism and Insurgencies’, creates a risk perception in the minds of investors with interest in the Indian market.
The ranking of ‘Corruption, Bribery & Corporate Frauds’ is at number 3 in IRS 2017. As per World Bank’s Doing Business 2017 rankings, India currently stands at 130 out of 189 countries.
Interestingly, there is an overall sense of lowering corruption via regulations such as GST, Demonetisation, Make in India, the Digital India Program. However, the nature of corruption is such that it refuses to be completely removed.
Other risks in that order are: Natural Hazards, Political & Governance Instability. Fire, Strikes, Closures & Unrest, Crime, Business Espionage, Women’s Safety and Accidents.
FICCI secretary-general A Didar Singh said, “Risks to business establishments is detrimental to growth and development of any country. The nature of risks globally has changed enormously, and with their occurrences becoming more unexpected and their effects becoming more profound, risks need to be taken more seriously. In these changing times it is critical to understand emerging risks”
Pinkerton MD – India APAC & EMEA — global screening Rohit Karnatak added, “The threats faced in today’s dynamic environment requires a more holistic strategic approach and thus emphasizes the urgency to shift from a siloed approach to security management, to one that is more holistic and a more collaborative process of Enterprise Risk Management”.
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.
