iWorld
How do viewers engage with OTT videos
MUMBAI: Akamai Technologies, a cloud delivery platform, has released new research demonstrating how quality of video resolution and playback affects viewers’ engagement with and loyalty to over-the-top (OTT) video streaming services. Conveyed through advanced biometric measurement tools including facial coding and skin conductance, the findings underscore the importance of delivering consistent, high-quality video across any OTT business model.
Akamai research measures viewers’ physical and emotional reactions to buffering and low-quality video; shows disengaged viewers in both free and subscription-based (SVoD & AVoD) models.
According to the study conducted by third-party research firm Sensum, viewers disengage with emotive storylines and react negatively to low-quality streaming incidents like buffering regardless of the brand or interest in the content. The research shows negative emotions increase 16 per cent while engagement decreases nearly 20 per cent as a result of these poor experiences. The survey also demonstrates that 76 per cent of participants say they would stop using a service if issues such as buffering occurred several times.
“This unique research shows there is no place for low-quality video in any streaming business model,” said Akamai director of product marketing, media solutions, Ian Munford.
“The premium online video market is extremely competitive; the battle for revenue share is intense and subscriber acquisition costs are increasing, making differentiators like quality of experience more important than ever. Service providers cannot take risks with streaming experiences that are compromised by low resolution or buffering. They must provide consistent, high-quality experiences to help retain subscribers and reduce acquisition costs.”
The research also found:
Subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) brands lose the most engagement due to buffering while transactional video-on-demand (TVoD) models suffer the most negative impact to brand loyalty if delivering low-quality experiences.
High-resolution video content with emotive storylines improve viewer engagement by more than 10 per cent
When buffering begins:
Happiness drops 14 per cent
Negative emotions (disgust and sadness) increase by an average of eight per cent
Viewers’ feeling of surprise increases 27 per cent
Attention drops by three per cent and focus decreases by eight per cent
The study, one of the most comprehensive of its nature ever conducted, used a variety of testing procedures including sensory, implicit and explicit responses from more than 1,200 participants. All tests carried out adhered to the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) standards to ensure results could not be contaminated. Akamai also created fictitious brands to remove any previous emotional association with the business models and used the same content across all the brands to nullify the impact of content type on the respondents.
Meanwhile, Kaltura, a video technology provider, and Akamai entered into an agreement to extend their Net Alliance partnership to combine the power of Akamai’s Predictive Content Delivery with Kaltura’s TV Platform. Leveraging Akamai’s Predictive Content Delivery and CDN products, along with the Kaltura TV Platform’s deep customer behavior and content consumption intelligence, the joint solution facilitates predictive on-device caching of content, using smart resource management to efficiently download content in the background while on a strong Wi-Fi connection. The content is downloaded based on each user’s profile and history, and offered to the customer at any time for smooth offline viewing on any device regardless of network connection and quality. The solution is designed to allow video content providers to offer each user their preferred content with an excellent viewing experience.
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.
