iWorld
GUEST COLUMN: How to combat streaming piracy with OTT’s broken protocol?
Mumbai: With vast sums of money to be made, it’s not surprising that streaming pirates are continually upping their game to keep their highly profitable illegal businesses afloat. A recent global study conducted by Ampere Analysis for Synamedia found that sports streaming piracy alone is worth over $28 billion and the Global Innovation Policy Centre places the global TV industry’s losses from digital piracy between $39.3 to $95.4 billion per year.
From Bollywood and Hollywood blockbusters to LIVE sports including IPL and women’s football, streaming piracy has reached an industrial scale in India. Within minutes of release, stolen content is circulated, exchanged and sold on open internet sites and social media platforms, such as Telegram and WhatsApp, as well as on closed subscription-based pirate networks and dedicated OTT applications. Some illegitimate, subscription-based pirate services are now so good that consumers think they are using the brand’s own service, damaging the brand of the legitimate service and preventing upsell opportunities.
But with superior intelligence and the appropriate technology and legal procedures in place, the industry can stay one step ahead, protect its revenue streams and stop criminals siphoning off billions in revenue that rightfully belong to content owners and services providers.
Pirate profiteers raise the stakes
Although low quality pirate content filmed surreptitiously in cinemas is still available, as more consumers switch to digital platforms, pirates are using increasingly sophisticated ways to steal content – and deliver it in pristine quality.
And the pirates’ methods have advanced considerably since they simply exploited “the analogue hole”: in other words, stole content from the HDMI ports of Set Top Boxes. As license owners and operators have increased their protection methods, cracking down with a combination of source-detection and disruption technologies as well as legal action, pirates have been hunting for new and more concealed ways to source content and find the weak link in the chain.
From Digital Rights Management (DRM) hacking as seen recently with Widevine, to bypassing client watermarking and manipulating legitimate OTT applications, today’s streaming pirates have found ways to steal not just high-quality content but entire OTT services, including redistributing directly from the service provider’s content delivery network (CDN).
Sourcing, aggregating and distributing content
A quick Google search will quickly take you into a world of organised crime: industrial scale professional hackers, criminal technology experts with content aggregators, content wholesalers and content resellers conducting the biggest criminal heist the world has ever seen.
Current anti-piracy approaches – such as DRM, client hardening and concurrency restrictions are simply scratching the surface of OTT piracy and pirates continue to profit.
Using the intelligence provided by our operational security team and with access to pirates’ scripts, we have unearthed the root source of this problem – the OTT protocol is broken. The technology of OTT delivery makes it simple and cheap to set up as a pirate operator. Pirates don’t necessarily need to break the DRM to steal content. Using pirate servers and clients, pirates are hacking the OTT protocol to get the DRM license and redirect pirate clients to legitimate service and content providers’ CDNs.
With little to no acquisition or content costs, pirates have become ultimate media super-aggregators. They can bring highly-sought after content together at an unbeatable price with no geo restrictions or competition law challenges – and then redistribute the stolen content to their paying customers at the expense of the video service provider by using their infrastructure undetected.
Protecting content across the ecosystem
With an understanding about the methods used and insight into how pirates operate, Synamedia has developed the industry’s first solution to systemically address the inherent weaknesses that make it easy for pirates to not only steal content but also entire OTT services, including gaining access to the service provider’s CDN.
Synamedia OTT ServiceGuard makes it possible to securely distribute content on open platforms by validating that only legitimate subscribers and applications are granted authorised access and receive content. It gives each client a unique identity that is not cloneable and allocates secure keys for signing service requests, ensuring all client messages are validated for their authenticity and origin. This has a critical role to play in protecting content, but tackling piracy requires an all-round team approach, blending pre-breach approaches with proactive detection and disruption technologies and solutions.
Synamedia’s unrivalled intelligence-based model leverages AI technologies alongside human intelligence – including undercover investigators and cyber security, psychology, criminology, and sociology experts – to monitor and map the piracy supply chain, detect, deter and disrupt piracy and orchestrate anti-piracy activities and legal and technical takedowns.
The financial rewards on offer and the ease of set-up – combined with the low risk of arrest or meaningful punishment – means the problem of piracy will not go away. But, by making life as difficult as possible for both pirates and viewers of illicit streams and making legal subscriptions more attractive, content owners and rights holders can not only protect their content investments, but video service providers can cut infrastructure costs and create the opportunity to capture new subscribers.
(Deepak Bhatia is general manager and head of sales, India at Synamedia. The views expressed in this column are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them)
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.
