eNews
The selfie expert, OPPO F1 Plus, averages one sale every 1.1 seconds
MUMBAI: OPPO Mobiles, a leading global technology brand, announces that OPPO F1 Plus has averaged one sale every 1.1 seconds, reaching a total of 7 million units so far globally.
The news has added another feather to the cap as OPPO has already been ranked no 4 globally in the top 5 smartphone vendors list and is the best performing brand in the first quarter of 2016! The brand believes that OPPO’s success has to be credited to – commitment to fostering strong, fair relationships with distributors, company’s knack for creating effective promotional campaigns and most primarily strong and dedicated focus on the product.
Sky Li, Sky Li, OPPO Global VP, MD of International Mobile Business and President of OPPO India, said, “We are very excited with the performance of OPPO F1 Plus. Our focus on camera technology and photography-focused F series has resulted in excellent results for the brand – first with OPPO F1 becoming the best-selling model and now OPPO F1 Plus recording great sales. The acceptance from the consumers has been great and we believe that the reason behind this is the brand’s focus on taking consumer feedback seriously. We listen to users, and bring them meticulously designed, top-quality products that they’ll truly love. That’s what’s brought us this far and what will continue to drive us going forward.”
F1 Plus Soars on Quality and Innovation
OPPO is committed to both groundbreaking product design and industry-leading quality, which has propelled the F1 Plus’ success. On the design front, OPPO’s VOOC Flash Charge technology has been one of its most celebrated advances. OPPO also announced that by the end of June, global users of VOOC-enabled devices will reach 30 million.
VOOC’s industry-leading charging speeds are well-known, but an equally important advantage lies in the fact that it can achieve these speeds while preserving the longevity of the battery.
Industry standards stipulate that, after 500 charge cycles, a battery should still have 80% of its original capacity. The F1 Plus maintains this capacity through a full 900 cycles, making it 1.8 times stronger than the industry standard, on top of providing breakneck charging speeds.
OPPO spares no effort or expense in the expansive testing regime that its products undergo before reaching market. From the arrival of components at the factory to the final production stage, OPPO devices like the F1 Plus undergo 390 quality assurance tests, including four full trial production runs.
Among these tests are ones that are exclusive to OPPO, specially designed to take into account every last detail of the end user experience. As an example, OPPO’s unique procedure for testing one small but essential aspect of the F1 Plus: the micro-USB charging port.
OPPO realized that, with some competitor phones, users can inadvertently damage the inside of the charging port by inserting the charging cable at odd angles or exerting unusual pressure. Although it’s an unlikely occurrence, the consequences to the user can be critical.
To ensure that OPPO devices never experience this type of damage, they undergo a strict test: A charging cable is inserted into the port and then jerked in four directions, up, down, left and right, using 3 kilograms of pressure. A charging port is only allowed to advance to the production stage if it can undergo this harsh treatment a full 5,000 times without losing any functionality.
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.
