eNews
Recordable optical disc market may reach 4,224m units by ’25: Report
MUMBAI: The recordable optical disc market is expected to demonstrate a CAGR of -5.6 per cent during the forecast period and reach 4,224 Mn units by 2025. Wide-ranging product types such as CD, DVD and Blu-Ray Disc are products that cater to large data storage demands across numerous industries thus generating a desirable market for recordable optical discs.
This is according to Future Market Insights (FMI)’s latest report titled, “Recordable Optical Disc Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 2015 – 2025”.
Key market participants covered in the report include Sony Corporation, Fujifilm Holdings Corporation, Taiyo Yuden Co., Ltd., Hitachi Maxell Ltd., Imation Corp., CMC Magnetics Corporation, RITEK Corporation, Moser Baer India Limited, Falcon Technologies International L.L.C. and Singulus Technologies.
Globally, demand for recordable optical discs is declining at a rapid rate; however, cutting-edge innovation along with increasing awareness about data security and storage are expected to boost the demand for advanced optical discs in the near future.
According to an FMI analyst, “Global demand for optical storage disc market is declining due to the rapid adoption of new technologies such as cloud storage, Internet of Things (IoT) and Video on Demand (VOD). However, globally, increasing demand for archival solutions and positive outlook for the media and entertainment industry is expected to create significant demand for recordable optical discs in the near future.” The analyst added that major players in the recordable optical disc market are dedicated to invest into research and development (R&D) activities. This investment is majorly focused on product advancement that can be used for storing large amounts of data for longer durations. From a regional perspective, North America was the largest market for recordable optical disc, accounting for 41.4% market share in 2014. This region continues to dominate the market and the trend is expected to continue over the forecast period. Among countries, Japan and China are projected to play important roles due to the presence of key players. From end-user perspective, the media industry is projected to show a CAGR of -4.3% in terms of volume, during the forecast period. Increasing demand for archival solutions, the media and entertainment industry presents a positive market opportunity for the recordable optical discs.
Factors driving the recordable optical disc market are increasing consumer inclination towards recording HD broadcasts, growing demand for content protection and widening applications of the optical discs. However, stiff competition from other media storage devices and cloud-based storage services and high raw material costs restrain the growth of this market.
The global recordable optical disc market is segmented on the basis of region, product type and end-users. Product type includes CD, DVD and BD. CD is further sub-segmented into CD-R (audio type and data type) and CD-RW.
On the basis of end-users, the market is segmented into media industry, healthcare, educational institutes and others (manufacturing industry, telecom, BFSI, etc.). Key regions covered in the report include North America, Latin America, Western Europe (EU5), Eastern Europe, APEJ, Japan and the Middle East & Africa.
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.
