iWorld
CDN players work for efficient content delivery experience
MUMBAI: Internet users in India are growing exponentially, riding on the back of cheap smartphones and low-cost data plans. By 2020, there will be 730 million internet users in India. This makes content delivery networks (CDN) crucial and the need to be efficient.
In India, it’s a good time for CDN players to be in the market. The traffic growth is turning CDN into a necessity. While a major chunk of it is coming from tier III cities, rural areas where traditionally internet connection has not been good, Akamai media country sales manager Sandeep Reddy believes better in-depth optimisation can provide an enhanced experience to users at the fringes.
“In India, we have been seeing massive growth. It’s poised to grow 30 to 35 per cent year on year. That’s one of the fastest growth you can see in the world,” Limelight Networks country head Gaurav Malik says.
Several big CDN players provide added services. While some focus on fastest delivery of content, others highly emphasise on security to protect customer data. Along with digital growth, the CDN market also needs to ensure seamless viewer experience. If your content takes more than a few seconds to load, 50 per cent of the traffic is likely to bounce off. The need of the hour is faster delivery.
Brightcove, a leading technology company in the field, started in 2004, has stuck to a B2B model since inception. Though it is not directly aligned to customers, the company’s obsession lies with end-user experience. Brightcove media head Greg Armshaw emphasises on the importance of fast delivery. Without claiming to be the fastest players, he says that engineers are working to focus on faster video loading and playing.
Brightcove has its own proprietary software named Context Aware Encoding. “It’s a machine learning process where we examine the content of each frame of the video. We analyse based on past approvals and if we need to save more information about that frame,” says Armshaw.
While cost of delivery is one of the biggest expenditures, Armshaw assures the company can save between 30-50 per cent of it with quality products. One of the features is to look at every frame, encode them and this allows for savings too.
Among other CDN players and large competitors, he thinks this is one feature which adds value to Brightcove’s existence in the space. Recently, Young Hollywood reduced its operational cost using this technology. Its over the top (OTT) channel, Young Hollywood TV, realised a 23 per cent saving in storage and a 35 per cent saving in bandwidth.
Despite the improvement in infrastructure, technological hurdles mar the outcome. One of the challenges, as Malik highlights, is that planned events can be executed better while unforeseen instances like the Ram Rahim row in Punjab can cause hassles. In case of these unplanned events, CDN can face a problem.
With more OTT apps than ever, content discovery for users can be a challenge. Analytics can be the only way out to provide users with great recommendations by getting constant feedback of users’ experience.
Reddy thinks analytics can pave the way for good recommendation by analysing user habit. “Analytics is a growth area for understanding customers and harvesting information about people’s consumption,” Armshaw says.
“Analytics of data is the core of any business, whether its OTT or not. That gives the visibility on what’s working and what’s not. It tells you how people are reacting and adapting to it so that you can improve, learn and improvise on that. It’s a constant feedback,” Malik adds.
Reddy also mentions ‘deeper focus on analytics’ as one of the company’s new initiatives. “We have a tool called cloud test which helps to determine and understand user interaction with the site. End user performance monitoring is a big area of focus,” he says.
CDNs are known to also be targets of piracy such as stealing of live stream and encoding it. However, some players believe streaming is not the primary root of piracy and creating a pay-worthy environment on platforms can curb the problem.
To lessen the security threat also, CDN companies have various tools. While Limelight Networks uses a private network to manage everything across data centres, Akamai has a platform-based service to protect customers from attacks. The company also tries to provide smarter authentication protocols so that only legitimate users can avail the content.
Content creators are churning out more to gobble and CDN players are there to provide users with better experience. But today, CDN companies are indulging in more services. The more good content and technology will go hand in hand, more users will be attracted to the digital content.
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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.
