eNews
India congregates at Mipcom as TV industry grapples with streaming wars
CANNES: Mipcom 2025 opens its doors on 13 October in Cannes, and India is making serious noise. Whilst the global television and streaming industries thrash about in existential angst—wondering what they are, where they’re going, and whether anyone still watches television—over 10,500 participants and 330-plus exhibitors from more than 100 countries are cramming into the Palais des Festivals. Identity crisis? Not on India’s watch.
RX management, which runs this annual gathering, expects the gloom to lift the moment delegates start talking deals. And nowhere is the optimism more palpable than in the Indian contingent, which has arrived in force with more than 70 companies ready to do business.
Centre stage sits the Indian Pavilion—a sprawling 100 sq m affair rebranded as the Bharat Pavilion/Waves Bazaar. It’s a joint initiative between the Indian consulate in Marseilles, the ministry of information and broadcasting, and the Services Export Promotion Council. More than 40 Indian companies have piled in under its banner: animation studios, video service outfits, content distributors, post-production houses—the full ecosystem.
But the real heavyweights are flying solo. Eschewing the shared space, a formidable lineup of Indian firms have planted their own flags with independent exhibition stands: Animation Xpress, Amagi Media, Enterr10 Television (which runs the Dangal channel), GoQuest Media, JioStar India, One Life Studios, One Take Media, PowerKids Entertainment, Rajshri Entertainment, Rusk Media, Shemaroo Entertainment, and Zee Entertainment Enterprises. It’s a show of strength that reflects India’s growing clout in the global content economy.
Indian delegates hunting for content—whether licensing hit formats or acquiring finished programming—number more than 120 this year, a figure that underscores the country’s voracious appetite for fresh material and its ambitions as both buyer and seller.
Hiren Gada, chief executive of Shemaroo Entertainment, said he was returning to Mipcom after many years away and was “looking forward to some exciting meetings with international clients.” The veteran executive’s presence signals that even established players see renewed opportunity in the current market turbulence.
Siddharth Kumar Tewary, founder of One Life Studios, called the atmosphere “electric,” adding that his company was now positioning itself as a global multiplatform content and production services partner—not merely an Indian supplier, but a genuine international player capable of creating content for any screen, anywhere.
The Indian surge comes at a curious moment. Traditional broadcasters are bleeding viewers to streaming platforms – which are themselves struggling against the vertical and micro drama platforms and Fast services -trying to figure out sustainable business models. Studios are consolidating, mergers are multiplying, and nobody quite knows whether “peak TV” was last year or five years ago. Yet Cannes remains Cannes—a place where hope springs eternal and every conversation might be the one that spawns the next global hit.
As deals snap shut and pitches fly across the sun-drenched Riviera, sleepy Cannes has morphed once more into the pulsing nerve centre of the global content trade. Champagne corks pop, business cards change hands at dizzying speed, and somewhere in the Palais a Hindi-language crime thriller is being sold to a Scandinavian broadcaster who’s convinced it’s the next Squid Game.
Streaming uncertainty be damned. The curtain rises, the cameras roll, and India’s moment in the spotlight has arrived—louder, brighter and more confident than ever.
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.
