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AI dominates IFA’s ShowStoppers showcase
BERLIN: Artificial intelligence was the undisputed headline act at ShowStoppers, IFA Berlin’s official press preview held on 4 September. Over 80 exhibitors packed the three-hour session, giving journalists and influencers an early glimpse of the products set to crowd Europe’s largest tech fair. While the categories stretched from household appliances to personal devices, one theme was inescapable: the wholesale integration of AI.
Rugged garden mowers, once defined by brute force, now tout autonomous navigation and weather-proofing. Wet-and-dry vacuum cleaners use AI to map, learn and optimise cleaning routes. Gimbals offer intelligent tracking for creators on the go, while rugged smartphones double up as portable projectors. Energy-saving household devices market themselves as “self-learning”, promising to trim electricity bills through adaptive use.
Hardware makers leaned on portability as well. A 14-inch laptop weighing a mere 800 grams drew attention, billed as a featherweight workhorse. Gesture-following mini-drones pitched themselves as toys and tools in equal measure. Even the stubbornly unpopular 3D tablet resurfaced—evidence that manufacturers, though faced with consumer apathy, remain unwilling to abandon the technology. A neat surprise came in the form of badge-shaped AI translators—clip-on devices priced for the mass market and small enough to stick onto the back of a phone.
But the boldest leap was not practical utility but companionship. One company showcased devices capable of generating anime-style characters that converse with their owners, others displayed cute little creatures sold as “digital friends.” The trend hints at a market where technology is less about solving chores and more about filling social and emotional gaps. AI-driven lighting systems and solar solutions underscored how deeply the technology has permeated the design ethos: AI is no longer a bolt-on, it is the organising principle.
Beyond the gadgets themselves, the origins told their own story. By some estimates, nearly two-thirds of the exhibits could be traced back to China, with Shenzhen firms leading the charge. Their formula—affordable prices married to rapid product cycles and nimble manufacturing—has become hard to beat. For European consumer electronics firms, this dominance is a looming worry. Once the bastions of innovation, many now risk being outpriced and outpaced by their Chinese rivals.
The prevalence of Chinese exhibitors at ShowStoppers reflects a wider shift in the global electronics market, where Asia increasingly dictates both the direction and the speed of innovation. The question for Europe is whether design and brand heritage can offset the brute force of Shenzhen’s cost efficiency.
For IFA itself, the preview doubled as a stage for a strategic announcement. Organisers confirmed a fresh deal with Berlin authorities, extending the trade show’s stay in the city until 2034. That decision quells speculation that IFA might become a travelling exhibition, rotating between global capitals. Instead, Berlin remains the fair’s long-term anchor—a boon for the city’s tech ecosystem, hotels and conference economy.
The main event kicks off on 5 September and runs until 9 September. If ShowStoppers was any guide, the halls will be thick with AI, from the mundane to the fantastical.
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.
