eNews
Convergence ’17: Planetcast plans virtualised broadcast, Cyient lauds JAM
MUMBAI: Convergence India 2017 presented a complete picture of the current industry landscape and emerging technologies in the ICT, broadcast and digital media sectors. The inspiring keynotes and tech workshops on timely topics, led by industry experts encourage innovative thinking.
Every year technology czars and startups alike descend on New Delhi to either showcase the amazing products and solutions or to clinch deals behind the scene at Convergence India. Planetcast, a leading provider of technical services and solutions in the Indian broadcasting sector, will soon roll out virtualised broadcast services to provide seamless and secure remote access to customers so that they can monitor and control processes wherever they are.
Covering a broad set of topics, starting from ‘Digital India campaign’ to ‘How Internet of Things is Transforming Business for Enterprises’ to ‘Why Adoption of Cloud Technology is Important’ to ‘5G-The Next Big Step in Mobile Communication Technologies and How It will Revolutionise the Customer Experience’ to ‘Digitisation Challenges in India’ to ‘Next Gen TV’, the sessions engage in discussions crucial to the advancement of the ICT, broadcast and digital media sectors.
‘Digital India’ discussions focused on the Digital India 2020 priorities and building a successful digital service ecosystem.
Cyient India founder & executive chairman BVR Mohan Reddy said, “One of the biggest examples of Digital India is JAM, i.e. Jandhan , Adhaar and Mobile connectivity. With such initiatives, we can see direct benefit being transferred to the end user. The biggest challenge in India is a lack of quality education and therefore many people still cannot use any of the digital platforms. Additionally, there is an urgent need to address cyber security issues.”
Stating that the three pillars of the Digital India campaign include vision of the government, policy matters, and user behaviour, CISCO India & SAARC MD Sanjay Kaul said, “Digitisation will impact all industries and it may seem as a disruption in the beginning, but at the end it will be valuable for the progress of the country.”
The session, ‘Mobile Phone Industry – Torch bearer of the Make in India and the Digital India initiatives,’ witnessed discussions aimed at strengthening the Indian mobile phone manufacturing ecosystem in sync with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ initiatives.
Intex India senior advisor Ramesh Vasvani said, “Mobile phones have created a great success story in India and are a boon to our economy. The mobile handset manufacturing industry has emerged as a platform for schemes like Make in India and Digital India, which has helped in increased transactions through e-wallets.”
Xolo India business head Sunil Raina added, “One of the greatest advantages is that most of the software for mobile phones is created in India.”
Elemental, an Amazon Web Services Company, empowers media companies to deliver premium video experiences to consumers. At the booth, visitors learned about how the company provides media organisations with a family of on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based solutions for Internet-based video delivery.
The ‘open’ part of the new platform will allow data owners, developers and others to add, mix, and manipulate data for themselves. Content providers to the platform might be car manufacturers, business owners, transit authorities, government agencies, and more.
The latest innovative and ground-breaking release of Skyline Communications’ global leading end-to-end network management platform DataMiner makes it possible to manage operations more easily and efficiently. DataMiner 9.5 provides unprecedented visibility on user experience, and enables unrivaled orchestration in the most complex and versatile technology ecosystems.
At the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) booth, see how C-DOT’s GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) solution is fueling the backbone of BharatNet, the prestigious nationwide optical fibre based network connecting 2.5 lakh Panchayats in the nation with high speed broadband. C-DOT’s unflinching determination towards promotion of “Digital Literacy” is well reflected in its unique innovation, GyanSetu, that is capable of extending the benefits of Internet to the illiterate populace of India including the specially abled in an easy and convenient manner thus spurring the socio-economic growth.
Verimatrix, which specialises in securing and enhancing revenue for multi-network, multi-screen digital TV services around the globe, showcases the Verimatrix Verspective™ Intelligence Center that offers a cloud-based security platform.
UNLIMIT, the first dedicated business unit, is completely focused on providing Internet of Things (IoT) services to enterprise customers throughout India. The company is working on some very interesting new products which will be rolled out as services.
LaCie, the premium brand from Seagate Technology plc, announced the LaCie® 12big Thunderbolt 3 and 6big Thunderbolt 3, aimed at helping video professionals excel with ultra high-resolution footage. With up to 120TB of massive capacity, the breakthrough performance of Thunderbolt 3 and RAID 5/6, the LaCie 12big and the LaCie 6big help video professionals meet the data demands of 4/5/6K cameras.
AJA Video Systems introduced the Ki Pro Ultra – a next generation file-based 4K/UltraHD and 2K/HD video recorder and player with a built-in HD LCD monitor. Ki Pro Ultra is capable of capturing edit-ready 4K (4096 x 2160), UltraHD (3840 x 2160), 2K (2048 x 1080) and HD (1920 x 1080) Apple ProRes files. Ki Pro Ultra also supports a range of video formats and frame rates up to 4K 60p, and offers flexible input and output connectivity.
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.
