iWorld
Piracy at YouTube under check, claims Raghavan
NEW DELHI: YouTube India head of content operations Satya Raghavan has claimed that it has succeeded in curbing piracy on its platform to a large extent. Veteran actress Shabana Azmi along with the young actor Tannishtha Chatterjee was the cynosure of all eyes as they conducted a session in Producers’ Lab at the ongoing Film Bazaar at IFFI Goa on ‘How to Pitch an Actor’.
Speaking in the Building Communities and Icons section at the Bazaar, Raghavan said “When you upload a film on YouTube, a fingerprint of that film is created. If somebody else is uploading that film, there are a certain proofs by which you come to know about this. YouTube is perhaps the only platform where you can actually know that someone has put up your content but you need to put your content up first, because about 500 hours of content is being uploaded every minute. This is a great system that allows the content owner to understand if their content is being pirated.” He was conducting an engrossing session about the burgeoning digital space and the platform that Youtube has provided filmmakers.
On monetisation of a Youtube channel, he said, “Once you turn on the section called monetisation in your backend control centre, only then will it serve you ads. You also have to think about whether you’re sending the right signals through your content, which is by giving good descriptions, that help to identify the content and helps us match it with viewers on the other side.”
The Bazaar organized by the National Film Development Corporation concludes tomorrow. It is held to coincide with the International Film Festival of India which will conclude on 27 November.
Azmi, who attended the Film Bazaar for the first time since it commenced a decade earlier, was also there to promote her upcoming film Idgah which is a part of the ‘Film Bazaar Recommends’ section. She said, “I learnt there is a formal way in which film business can be conducted. I think it’s important because I’m very interested in the work of first-time filmmakers.”
“I think these tags of a film being ‘women-oriented’ and ‘heroine-oriented’ have to slowly go out at some point, to feel that we are reaching a point of gender equality, and recognising that cinema is essentially a medium of storytelling,” said Chatterjee.
“It’s important to highlight the truths about women today, no matter how ugly they are,” said theatre artist/filmmaker/screenwriter Vani Tripathi Tikoo. “Once we address this, the change is cumulative, and only then will it be accepted widely as a part of our culture and society.”
Producer Kiran Rao, who spent most of her time catching diverse south Asian films in the Viewing Room, said Aamir Khan Productions will attend the next edition of the NFDC Film Bazaar.
“The Film Bazaar has changed the landscape of how films are made and distributed, and really brought the film community together. It’s a fantastic and much-needed annual event. Aamir Khan Productions will hope to look for projects, meet people and find talent here. The Viewing Room is a great resource that Deepti DCunha, programmer of WIP, has created,” Rao said.
The Knowledge Series started with the Investor Pitch of Film Bazaar Recommends (Part I) which screened documentary and film trailers followed by a short presentation by the filmmakers, highlighting the support that they needed to complete their process.
Baradwaj Rangan moderated a discussion with filmmaker Prakash Jha, Chatterjee and Tikoo on “Women Protagonists in Indian Filmscape – Changing Dynamics.”
In the discussion on Unique Distribution Models – Reaching Out With Independent Films moderator by filmmaker Rohan Sippy, panelists included filmmakers Sandeep Mohan, director of Love, Wrinkle-Free and Hola Venky!, and Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, who started ‘Cinema Cab’, a movement to screen films across the length and breadth of Kerala, and co-founder and CEO of Reelmonk Vivek Paul.
Rohan Sippy explored the intricacies of the two filmmakers’ approaches, which both thrived on a non-monetary promotional approach and remarked, “It’s very interesting how you have managed to create unique models that work for you and your specific films and audiences. It takes a lot of conviction to follow through on such a vision of involving the audience, and taking the film to them.”
In Storytelling & Narratives in 360 degrees section, Amsterdam Creative Industries Network Coordinator of Interaction and Games Lab Mirjam Vosmeer presented an illuminating presentation on Virtual Reality, and spoke at length about the various aspects of the uncharted territory that are being researched upon.
Filmmaker and animator Gitanjali Rao who moderated the discussion and posed questions from the point of view of a filmmaker.“It is such a different way of telling stories. Besides, the fantasy and pleasure aspect of Virtual Reality, it is the empathy that it can induce in the viewer that really fascinates me,” she confessed. “To be able to involve an audience in such an immersive way has a lot of potential, especially for documentary filmmakers.”
The panel discussion on Queen’s Journey & Filming In the Netherlands moderated by the media specialist and author Vanita Kohli-Khandekar included film commissioner, Nederlands Filmfonds, Bas Van der Reem, the producer Thomas Drijver and the producer of Queen Vivek Bajrang Agrawal. The panel discussion on VOD as the key distribution platforms for independent films included founder of The Film Collaborative, Orly Ravid, and Vista India CEO Suri Gopalan.
Before the film bazaar commenced, the Film Facilitation Office had organised a one-day Workshop with Nodal Officers appointed by various State Governments and Central Government Ministries / Departments / Agencies to act as the one-point contact for easing the process of filming in their respective jurisdiction.
The workshop included a case study presentation by Gujarat, which won the National Award for the Most Film Friendly State in 2016. It is envisaged that these discussions would motivate and mobilize the Nodal officers from State and Central Governments towards not only easier and timely facilitation of permissions for shooting films in their State, but also undertaking initiatives for a favorable filming environment.
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.
