eNews
InfoComm India summit’s headlining speakers to discuss smart cities, cyber security
MUMBAI: InfoComm International, the trade association representing the commercial audiovisual industry worldwide, has announced the summit program for InfoComm India, set for Sept. 12-14, 2016 at the Bombay Exhibition Centre, in Mumbai. The InfoComm India Summit’s three days of sessions will focus on key issues in the pro-AV industry, with headlining speakers talking smart-city design and planning and cyber security.
Marking its fourth year, InfoComm India 2016 will feature an exhibition of more than 200 leading pro-AV companies, as well as the InfoComm India Summit where experts share emerging trends and in-depth market insights.
Dr. Uma Maheswaran, CEO of SurbanaJurong Consultants (South Asia and Middle East), will discuss the challenges India faces with its smart-city mission. SurbanaJurong Consultantshas worked on consulting, design/build, and facilities management projects in 229 cities spanning 47 countries and completed 72 projects across 11 states in India. The firm is also involved in the master-planning of Andhra Pradesh’s New Capital City. Dr.Maheswaran’s session is a chance for attendees to learn how this development could potentially be a model for other smart cities.
Dr. Madan Oberoi, Director for Cyber Innovation and Outreach at the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation in Singapore, will speak on the need for recalibrating the law enforcement strategy to counter evolving cyber threats.With digital and information technology playing an increasingly important role in business, India, host to some of the world’s biggest IT service companies, is seen as a growth frontier in a perilous online environment. India’s vulnerability to cybercrimes has attracted both the public and private sector to take a hard look at implementing policies, laws and learn from global best practices to keep “Digital India” safe and secured.
The Summit program provides a forum for AV professionals to update their knowledge on the latest technology and market trends, from designing for visual environments to understanding the impact of the Internet of Things. To help institutional end-users better understand how AV technology can help their businesses, the program also features sessions designed specifically for the IT, education, defense and live-events industries.
“InfoComm India is the only event in India that brings together all the key stakeholders in the AV market — global manufacturers, their channel partners, and institutional end-users from the entire spectrum of industries that can benefit from AV technology,” said Richard Tan, Executive Director of InfoCommAsia, which produces the InfoComm India show. “We’re pleased to welcome so many renowned speakers from all over the world to lead our sessions andshare their knowledge and experience.”
Asia Pacific comprises 36.5 percent of the global professional audiovisual market, according to InfoComm’s2014 Market Definition and Strategy Study. The World Bank is forecasting India’s economy to grow 7.5 percent in 2016. With increased growth in the years to follow, India’s economy is the peak of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
“India presents an immense opportunity to develop an incomparable pro-AV and information communications technology infrastructure for decades to come,” said David Labuskes, CTS®, CAE, RCDD, Executive Director and CEO, InfoComm International. “In the last few years, InfoComm has taken big steps to support the AV industry in the Asia-Pacific market as we’ve seen the economy surge. InfoComm now has many resources in the region, including association staff, live courses, roundtable events, CTS exams and more.”
During InfoComm India, attendees can visit the InfoComm booth for in-person, one-on-one professional development consultations. At the end of the consultation, participants will receive a tailored plan of training opportunities not only from InfoComm, but also from others sources inside and outside the AV industry, including courses devoted to information technology and networking, as well as business management. Many of the education sources that are part of InfoComm’s offering deliver free and low-cost training.
In addition, the Women of InfoComm Network (WIN) council will hold its first event in India on Sept. 13 during InfoComm India. WIN provides women with a supportive environment to discuss their profession and educational resources to help advance their skills. The event will include prominent women within the AV industry discussing their experiences.
“The Indian AV market is growing very fast, yet there are very few women in technical and senior management positions,” said Betsy Jaffe, WIN Staff Liaisonand Senior Vice President of Member Services, InfoComm International. “WIN will be working in India to encourage women to join the AV workforce; and for women in the industry, we’ll provide resources and support to help them succeed in their careers.”
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.
