eNews
IBC 2025 badges to work as free transport passes as well in Amsterdam
AMSTERDAM: This is good news for all visitors to Amsterdam’s grand IBC show. Come September 2025 onwards, the organisation is set to transform the onsite experience for its global attendees with the launch of a pioneering new feature: full integration of Amsterdam’s GVB public transport pass into the official event badge.
Developed in collaboration with long-time venue partner Rai Amsterdam, Amsterdam public transport operator GVB, and smart credentialing provider CredsNow, this initiative will provide frictionless, ticket-free access to the city’s extensive tram, bus and metro network – delivering a seamless, sustainable, and tech-forward experience for the tens of thousands of professionals attending this year’s show.
In a first-of-its-kind deployment for the event, all IBC2025 badges will include an embedded QR code linked directly to the GVB system. Attendees will be able to move seamlessly between the RAI and central Amsterdam using public transport, simply by scanning the QR code on their badge – eliminating the need for additional cards, tickets or apps. This frictionless integration not only simplifies city navigation for attendees but also underscores IBC and RAI’s commitment to sustainability by encouraging the use of public transport and reducing non-recyclable ticket printing.
“This is more than a convenience,” said IBC operations director Tamsin Christofides. “This reflects our commitment to sustainability, user-centric innovation, and our ongoing efforts to ensure that Amsterdam continues to be a welcoming and accessible destination for IBC2025”.
Rai Amsterdam, known for its commitment to green practices, has enabled free city travel for all IBC attendees across GVB’s public transport network for many years as part of its long-standing partnership with IBC. Through close collaboration with GVB and IBC, attendee travel has transformed from early ticketing measures to issuing printed passes on-site and this year, with the support of CredsNow, integrating the GVB travel pass directly within the event badge.
“This integration supports our ambition to create truly sustainable events, and underwrites RAI’s long term commitment to IBC Show,” said Rai Amsterdam COO Maurits van der Sluis. “By connecting the city’s transport system directly to the badge, we’re removing barriers and improving the visitor journey in a meaningful, future-forward way.”
CredsNow, the smart credentialing platform behind the integrated badge technology, played a key role in making this vision a reality. “We’re proud to support IBC with our secure, smart infrastructure,” said CredsNow CEO Ivan Lazarev. “This collaboration showcases how digital innovation can deliver real-world impact and smarter event mobility.”
“Our city continues to champion fair transport policies and future-ready event experiences for international visitors,” said GVB sr account manager corporate sales Erik Maitimo. “Close cooperation with Rai Amsterdam and event partners has helped us offer flexible, affordable, greener travel experiences for exhibition attendees. This collaboration demonstrates what’s possible when innovation meets purpose – by embedding our services into the very fabric of the IBC experience, we make public transit the default and easiest choice.”
IBC2025 takes place from 12–15 September at the Rai Amsterdam. Attendees will be able to use their badge to enter the venue and board any GVB-operated service throughout the city, reducing reliance on cars and streamlining travel across the event. To register for IBC2025, click here.
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.
