iWorld
Android future of TV, but many unwilling to pay
NEW DELHI: Around 72% of respondents in a recent survey are considering Android implementations as a part of their set-top box (STB) strategies. In addition, 50% of respondents in a global survey see Android as being important for their goals within the next five years.
These are among the findings of a research done by digital security platform Irdeto and OvumConsulting indicating that a majority of video service providers have either Android TV or Android Open Source Project (AOSP) on their technology roadmaps.
Conducted in February 2017, the study “Is Android the future of the set-top box?” covered 300 TV industry professionals.
Around 106 respondents were from APAC, segregated by Ovum into two categories: Developed which had 58 respondents and developing which had 48 respondents. India figures in the latter category.
It also identified a variety of benefits they perceive Android TV to offer, including the availability of new features and services, faster time-to-market, an attractive user interface and cost efficiencies.
However, while a majority of respondents indicated a commitment to Android, only 54% of video service providers are willing to pay more for Android chipsets than traditional chipsets with embedded middleware.
Features, specifically the ability for users to download additional apps, are the driving force leading Android implementations. Video service providers with more than one million subscribers (43%) and those with less than one million subscribers (34%) both said that this was the number one driver for adoption.
However, despite service providers’ confidence in the benefits of Android TV, there are significant concerns around piracy and cyberthreats. By allowing easy installations of other applications onto the STB, 43% of respondents believe there will be an increased attack surface, while 41% are concerned that their subscribers could install apps for illegal streaming.
“Video service providers are feeling pressure to continue to innovate their offerings to satisfy consumer demand for an optimal user experience,” said Irdeto director of Product Management Frank Poppelsdorf. “These results indicate that Android TV is not only on pace to play a critical role in the future of TV distribution, but are essential for the industry to meet growing consumer demand for new and innovative services. However, the open nature of the technology brings up several security concerns, especially in regard to piracy. As the industry continues to shift toward more open platforms for the set-top box, it will be critical for video service providers to implement a robust 360-degree security approach to ensure their premium content is protected while optimizing flexibility and time to market.”
While many expect Android to dominate the TV landscape in the near future, the survey revealed that more education on the differences between Android platforms may be needed. Only 52% of those surveyed understand the differences between Android TV and AOSP.
“Education on Android platforms is critical for video service providers to understand the capabilities, benefits and drawbacks of each technology in order to make the best strategic decision concerning their technology roadmap,” saidOvum Practioce Leader TV Ed Barton. “These types of insights identified in our survey with Irdeto are key to help pay TV operators, broadcasters and OTT streaming providers better anticipate the opportunities and challenges ahead. We were pleased to work with Irdeto on this survey of C-Level executives as well as professionals across multiple disciplines to identify Android strategies that will shape the pay TV market in the years ahead.”
As platforms like Android TV become the new norm in the TV landscape, it will be important for operators to employ a holistic, 360-degree security approach to secure these next-generation devices. Stofa, Denmark’s most innovative supplier of cable TV and broadband internet services, recently selected Irdeto Cloaked CA to securely deliver content through its upcoming new Android set-top box (STB). Not only will subscribers have the full range of Stofa services on the STB, they will also have direct access to the Google Play app store and to streaming services such as YouTube. Stofa intends to revolutionize the user experience with its new Android STB and with Irdeto’s latest renewable and cardless software security, any form of content delivered to customers will be robustly protected.
The survey was commissioned by Irdeto and conducted in February 2017 by Ovum. 301 TV industry professionals spread across six regional groupings, including APAC, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America, Middle East & Africa and North America participated in the survey. All respondent companies provide video services as part of their business and the service provider types were Internet service providers, OTT video providers, pay TV operators (cable, DTT and satellite) and telecoms providers. The survey targeted an informed audience with a representative proportion of C-level respondents alongside technology, content, marketing and network security.
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.
