iWorld
Content & channel management vital as Asian production enters new growth cycle
MUMBAI: The TV, film and video production sector in Asia is set to enter a new cycle of growth, according to a new report from Media Partners Asia (MPA), as economic development and evolving distribution ecosystems stoke competition and demand for better shows, as well as more varied formats and approaches.
MPA’s Video Content Dynamics, published today, reviews industry supply, demand and key drivers across India, Korea and five markets in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) on free, pay and OTT platforms. The report breaks out ratings performance, economics and key players by genre (drama, movies, news, sports, kids and factual), as well as theatrical performance for local and international films.
TV is the dominant viewing platform in these markets. However, as more people get access to affordable high-speed broadband, quality content as well as proactive channel management are becoming increasingly important for incumbent broadcasters, MPA analysts noted.
“Online video is gaining traction in key emerging markets, as broadband speeds increase and connection costs come down,” said Media Partners Asia VP – Research & Consulting Steve Laslocky. “Leading broadcasters are rolling out ad-supported catch-up services while subscription online video services (local, regional and global) are gaining traction with premium Asian content as well as domestic and Hollywood movies. More than ever, a healthy local production ecosystem is a vital component of a healthy TV market.”
Korean content remains the gold standard for production in Asia, expanding beyond drama and film to become a genre in its own right. Costs are increasing in Korea’s highly competitive domestic marketplace, where profits are challenging. At the same time, demand and pricing power in MPA-surveyed markets continue to rise across both TV and online video, helping sustain Korea’s leadership position.
MIXED PICTURE ACROSS ASIA
Future growth prospects and the relative health of local production varies across the seven markets covered by MPA’s Asia Video Content Dynamics report. Broadcasters that rely heavily on in-house teams, as seen in Malaysia and the Philippines for example, risk stifling ideas and competition. On the other hand, too many third-party studios competing for work can squeeze margins. This trend, seen in India’s TV industry, leaves little money to reinvest and develop local production for the opportunities and challenges ahead.
Indonesia stands out as a relatively healthy ecosystem among Asian growth markets. Southeast Asia’s largest economy comprises comparatively few major production houses, often operating with backing from one of the country’s major TV groups. Production costs are relatively low, while the free-to-air ad market remains buoyant, providing good returns for popular shows. This bodes well for the future development of Indonesian content.
By contrast, the environment for production in India is almost the opposite. The rollout of digital TV is dramatically expanding viewer choices for hundreds of millions of homes in the sub-continent, while opening up opportunities to develop premium and more targeted content. However, intense competition for TV revenues between hundreds of local production houses has driven margins to 15% and below, making it difficult to capitalize on these changes.
DRAMA RULES, BUT GENRE MIX CRUCIAL
Multiple genres are fueling consumption on free, pay and OTT services. Local dramas, however, remain the most important ratings driver across much of the region, despite concerns about stale storylines.
In India for example, domestic drama accounted for over half of all TV viewing last year, underscoring its dominance. Local series were also popular in Southeast Asia, representing 46% of viewing in Vietnam, 35% of viewing in Thailand and 31% of viewing in the Philippines.
Movies also tend to rate well on TV, especially in countries with a strong domestic film industry. This is especially evident in India as well as Indonesia and the Philippines, the two markets in Southeast Asia with the largest box office and where local films also have the highest share of revenue.
Sports, meanwhile, is a high-profile and high-rating but ultimately event-driven genre. Many international marquee events are aired late at night, limiting viewership, underscoring the importance of local tournaments. Monetization for some local sports, such as football in Malaysia, still lags international franchises however, despite high ratings.
Contrary to common perception, sports is not a major audience contributor on pay-TV, while the popularity of recent Hollywood movies on pay-TV varies by market. Kids content, meanwhile, is a leading pay-TV genre in Indonesia (50% audience share) and the Philippines (22%).
Some OTT platforms are starting to compete on early windows for Asian content, although not on Hollywood movies, where studios can still command high prices from premium pay channels and pay-TV operators across most markets. This will likely change over time.
Investment in local content and original productions for the OTT window, meanwhile, is growing rapidly in India and slowly expanding across Southeast Asia. In markets such as Indonesia, local movies, dramas and series are boosting consumption across regional SVOD services.
Monetization for ad-supported services however, with the exception of YouTube, is proving to be a challenge. As online video gains scale in the region, industry standards for comparable viewing data will be crucial to further growing online video advertising outside of the YouTube ecosystem.
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
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.
