eNews
Half of video production may see greater RoI migrating to IP
MUMBAI: Ooyala, a global provider of video monetization technology and services, and the Digital Production Partnership (DPP), the media industry’s business change network, launched the industry’s first report analyzing the benefits of adopting Internet Protocol (IP)-based processes and technologies in video production, “The Business Benefits of IP Production.” The findings show that by 2022, more than half of the video-production environments analyzed in the report will recognize greater business benefits, efficiencies and return-on-investment (ROI) by adopting IP.
Surveying nearly 30 companies across the video supply chain, including ITV, Sky, BBC and Sony, the report shows where IP migrations will result in greater cost savings, cost avoidance, creative benefits and competitive advantages. Tracking against ten different production environments, five will see the greatest ROI by adopting IP, including:
● IP Distribution: Companies with internet-first distribution services, OTT
● Live Streaming: Companies distributing live content across devices and social
platforms
● Single Camera Shooting: Companies accessing on-site footage via the cloud
● Media Management: Companies managing, moving and storing media
● Cloud Playout: Linear TV stations adopting cloud-based services
The findings show media companies with online distribution at the heart of their business, particularly OTT services, will find the greatest value and ROI in adopting IP-based technologies. Other areas that IP disruption will impact are asset management, cloud playout and post-production, benefiting from technologies that reduce manual-labor costs such as automating metadata insertion.
“The fact is, the move to IP has inherent benefits for many processes, but only specific environments will see the greatest benefits and highest returns today,” said DPP Managing Director, Mark Harrison.
“Within a few years, IP infrastructure may be essential in doing business because of the impact it is having across media companies and distribution.” “As the first in the industry, the report brings to light the ROI opportunities for producers, broadcasters and media companies to adopt IP processes,” said Ooyala Co-founder and SVP of Products and Solutions, Belsasar Lepe. “Media logistics solutions like Ooyala Flex provide the ability to connect inherently disconnected and on-premise systems so companies can take
advantage of IP benefits immediately or incrementally as needs change over time.”
Ooyala and the DPP will host a special NAB morning event on Tuesday, 25 April at 8am PST in Ooyala’s booth, SV1000, to discuss the report and the future of IP production alongside BT Sport and PBS.
Built with superior analytics capabilities for advanced business intelligence, Ooyala’s solutions help broadcasters, operators and media companies build more engaged and more profitable audiences, with personalized experiences across every screen.Vudu, Star India, Sky Sports (U.K.), ITV Studios (U.K.), RTL Group (Germany), M6 (France), TV4 (Sweden), Mediaset (Spain), America Television (Peru), and Media Prima (Malaysia).
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.
