iWorld
Interoperable Bharat Wi-Fi to provide 1mn hotspots by ’19-end
NEW DELHI: Indian Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha has said the country will rollout one million Wi-Fi hotspots in the country by December 2019 via Bharat Wi-Fi, a country-wide common inter-operable platform. His colleague, IT and Electronics Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad later highlighted the government was also taking steps towards effective data protection as the country becomes more digital.
Announcing the connectivity initiative at the inauguration of the second edition of the India Mobile Congress 2018 (IMC) yesterday here, the Telecom Minister said Bharat Wi-Fi will be owned and operated by telecom service providers, ISPs and virtual network operators (VNOs) and consumers will have access to Wi-Fi hotspots of any of the partnering operators.
The interoperable Wi-Fi initiative is part of the Indian government’s fibre optic project BharatNet that aims to connect the country’s 250,000 gram panchayats or local village administrations and has “put mobility in the centre of next digital revolution”, the Minister highlighted, adding rise in convergence of services has led to adoption of new technologies.
Pointing out that revenue generation in India’s telecom sector has seen a rise of 220 per cent in the last four years, Sinha said, along with the information technology segment, the two sectors presently contribute approximately 6.5 per cent to the country’s GDP and has the potential to grow further.
Sinha, along with his other ministerial colleagues and industry stalwarts, including Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani and Bharti Airtel’s Sunil Mittal, also unveiled the National Frequency Allocation Plan 2018 (NFAP), a roadmap for the Indian digital communications industry.
The NFAP released a quantum of 605 MHz license-exempt spectrum in 5GHz band for wireless access services and radio local area networks in outdoor to meet the ever-growing appetite for data (from a current figure of 50 MHz since 2007).
The frequency allocation plan also offered over 30 license-exempt bandwidths for short range devices (SRDs), ultra-wideband devices (UWDs) and additional spectrum for M2M services, creating opportunities for the public to enjoy benefits from technologies and enabling the industry to build domestic manufacturing eco-system. India has signalled its spectrum plans for 5G services aspiring to adopt the next generation technology.
“The country is at the cusp of a digital revolution with disruptions happening in each and every sector and industry. With growing smartphone and internet penetration and with the finalisation of National Digital Communication Policy 2018, these are exciting times for the telecom sector, and the society at large,” Sinha said, adding that the launch of several innovative products will pave the path to accomplish Prime Minister Modi’s “vision of a digitally connected India”.
The three-day India Mobile Congress 2018 has been organised by Department of Telecoms and Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).
Earlier in the day while RIL’s Mukesh Ambani said Jio is ready to again disrupt the market with its fixed-line broadband service, Bharti Airtel’s Sunil Mittal exhorted the government to make more telecom industry-friendly policies as the sector continues to be highly taxed, similar to the tobacco industry, which is proving to be detrimental.
Among the key highlights of the first day of the IMC was the participation of 5G trials by companies like Reliance Jio InfoComm, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm.
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.
