eNews
Video will take 76% of Net in ’21, Indian users will double & devices grow by 2bn
NEW DELHI: Digital transformation will continue to drive IP traffic in India with the projected increase in Internet users from 373 million in 2016 to 829 million or 59% of the Indian population in 2021, which is among the highest in the world.
In addition, there will be two billion networked devices in 2021, up from 1.4 billion in 2016 and the overall IP traffic is expected to grow fourfold from 2016 to 2021, a compound annual growth rate of 30% – thus reaching 6.5 Exabytes of data per month in 2021, up from 1.7 Exabytes per month in 2016.
M2M connections will represent 22% of the total two billion devices and connections and will account for 5% of IP traffic by 2021. Advancements in IoT applications such as smart meters, package tracking, digital health monitors and a host of other next-generation M2M services is driving this incremental growth—nearly 21% increase in the next five years, according to Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast..
Video will continue to dominate IP traffic and overall Internet traffic growth – taking 76% of all Internet traffic in 2021, up from 57% in 2016. India will reach 84 billion Internet video minutes per month by 2021, which is 1,60,000 years of video per month, or about thirty two thousand video minutes every second.
“Mobile networks, devices and connections in India are not only getting smarter in their computing capabilities but are also evolving from lower-generation network connectivity (2G) to higher-generation network connectivity (3G, 3.5G, and 4G or LTE). Combining device capabilities with faster, higher bandwidth and more intelligent networks is leading to wide adoption of high bandwidth data, video and advanced multimedia applications that contribute to increased mobile and Wi-Fi traffic” said Cisco India & SAARC Managing Director, Service Provider Business, Sanjay Kaul.
He added: “We are witnessing a burgeoning rise in usage of mobile applications and connectivity by end users. The need for optimized bandwidth management, network automation, e2e security and ultimately network monetization through cost efficient data production is fuelling the growth of network automation, mass market 4G deployments and adoption, soon to be followed with 4.5G and 5G. Service providers around the world are busy architecting their networks to be more autonomous and capable of handling high bandwidth to help them meet the growing end-users demand for more bandwidth, higher security, and faster connectivity on the move. Many providers have also started field trials for 5G and are gearing towards rolling out 5G deployments towards the end of the VNI forecast period.”
India Internet Growth and Trends:
1. Increase in Internet Users, devices & connection
· In India, there will be 829 million total Internet users (59% of population) in 2021, up from 373 million (28% of population) in 2016
· In India, there will be 2.0 billion networked devices in 2021, up from 1.4 billion in 2016
2. Increase in IP Traffic & Internet Traffic
· In India, Consumer Internet video traffic will reach 3.0 Exabytes per month in 2021, the equivalent of 756 million DVDs per month, or 1 million DVDs per hour
· In India, Consumer Internet video traffic was 535 Petabytes per month in 2016, the equivalent of 134 million DVDs per month, or 183,261 DVDs per hour
· In India, Internet video traffic will be 77% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2021, up from 58% in 2016
· In India, Internet traffic will grow 4.0-fold from 2016 to 2021, a compound annual growth rate of 32%
· In 2021, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross the Internet every 54 minutes
· Indian Internet traffic in 2021 will be equivalent to 291x the volume of the entire Indian Internet in 2005
3. Increase in Per capita Usage
· In India, IP traffic will reach 5 Gigabytes per capita in 2021, up from 1 Gigabytes in 2016
4. Internet users & Faster Broadband Speed
· In India, there will be 829 million total Internet users (59% of population) in 2021, up from 373 million (28% of population) in 2016
· In India, the average fixed broadband speed will grow 2.8-fold from 2016 to 2021, from 6.6 Mbps to 18.2 Mbps
5. Increase in Mobile, Internet Video
· In India, mobile data traffic will grow seven-fold from 2016 to 2021, a compound annual growth rate of 49%
· In India, mobile data traffic in 2021 will be equivalent to 88x the volume of the entire Indian Internet in 2005
· In India, IP video will be 83% of all IP traffic in 2021, up from 69% in 2016
· In India, Internet video traffic will grow 5-fold from 2016 to 2021, a compound annual growth rate of 40%
· In India, total Internet video traffic (business and consumer, combined) will be 76% of all Internet traffic in 2021, up from 57% in 2016
· In India, HD will be 51.4% of Internet video traffic in 2021, up from 12.0% in 2016 (87.9% CAGR)
· In India, 84 billion minutes (159,201 years) of video content will cross the Internet each month in 2021. That’s 31,840 minutes of video streamed or downloaded every second
·In India, Internet video traffic will grow 5-fold from 2016 to 2021, a compound annual growth rate of 40%
6. Increase in Networked Devices
· In India, there will be 2.0 billion networked devices in 2021, from 1.4 billion networked devices in 2016, and 1.3 billion in 2015
· In India, 67% of all networked devices will be mobile-connected in 2021
7. Growth in Internet video & gaming traffic
· In India, Internet video traffic will be 77% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2021, up from 58% in 2016
· In India, gaming traffic will grow 7-fold from 2016 to 2021, a compound annual growth rate of 49%
Key Findings & Milestones from Global Traffic Projections and Service Adoption Trends
1. Strong Growth in IP & Internet Traffic
· Global IP traffic is expected to reach 278 exabytes per month by 2021, up from 96 exabytes per month in 2016. Global IP traffic is expected to reach an annual run rate of 3.3 zettabytes by 2021.
· Busy hour Internet traffic is increasing faster than average Internet traffic. Busy hour Internet traffic will grow 4.6-fold (35% CAGR) from 2016 to 2021, reaching 4.3 Pbps by 2021, compared to average Internet traffic that will grow 3.2-fold (26% CAGR) over the same period reaching 717 Tbps by 2021.
· Content delivery networks (CDNs), will carry 71% of all Internet video traffic by 2021 (up from 52 percent in 2016).
1. Average DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks size increasing steadily and approaching 1.2 Gpbs— enough to take most organizations completely offline
· DDoS incidents can paralyze networks by flooding servers and network devices with traffic from multiple IP sources.
· The peak attack size increased 60% Y/Y and represents up to 18% of a country’s total Internet traffic while they are occurring.
· Average DDoS attack size increased to 22% which is relatively the same rate as Internet traffic at 29 percent Y/Y.
· The DDoS attacks grew 172% in 2016 and will increase 2.5-fold to 3.1 million by 2021 globally.
2. Globally, total public W-Fi hotspots (including homespots) will grow 6-fold from 2016 to 2021 from 94 million in 2016 to 541.6 million by 2021.
· Globally, total Wi-Fi homespots will grow from 85 million in 2016 to 526.2 million by 2021.
· Globally there were 91 percent of public Wi-Fi hotspots in 2016 and by 2021 it is projected to reach 97 percent.
· Leading hotspot countries: China (170M by 2021), US (86M by 2021), Japan (33M by 2021), and France (30M by 2021).
3. By 2021, more than half (56 percent) of connected flat panel TV sets will be 4K up from 15% in 2016
· Installed/In-service 4K TV sets will increase from 85M in 2016 to 663M by 2021.
4. Cord-Cutting household traffic is 86 percent higher
· A global cord-cutting household generates 117 GB per month in 2017, compared to 63 GB per month for an average household.
5. Global Enterprise SD-WAN Traffic
· SD-WAN traffic will grow at a CAGR of 44% compared to 5% for traditional WAN SD-WAN will increase 6x and will be 25% of WAN traffic by 2021
· End-User Internet traffic is moving closer to the Edge. Nearly half of traffic will bypass core completely by 2021.
Regional IP Traffic Growth Details
· APAC: 107.7 exabytes/month by 2021, 26% CAGR, 3.2-fold growth
· North America: 85 exabytes/month by 2021, 20% CAGR, 2.5-fold growth
· Western Europe: 37.4 exabytes/month 2021, 22% CAGR, 2.7-fold growth
· Central Europe: 17.1 exabytes/month by 2021, 22% CAGR, 2.75-fold growth
· Latin America: 12.9 exabytes/month by 2021, 21% CAGR, 2.6-fold growth
· West Asia and Africa: 15.5 exabytes/month by 2021, 42% CAGR, 5.8-fold growth
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.
