iWorld
MPA report: Content investment in seven APAC markets grew four per cent in 2023
Mumbai: Media Partners Asia’s (MPA) 2024 Asia Video Content Dynamics report offers a comprehensive analysis of content investment, engagement, and viewership across TV, VOD, and theatrical sectors in seven key APAC markets: India, Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The report reveals that content investment in these markets reached $15.5 billion in 2023, marking a four per cent year-on-year increase. This growth, while positive, represents a significant slowdown from the 2021-22 period, reflecting a post-COVID normalization of budgets and a rationalisation of local content investment in streaming VOD. India led the charge with a robust 12 per cent growth, driven primarily by sports content, while Indonesia followed with a solid five per cent increase. Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand managed modest gains, whereas Malaysia and Vietnam experienced contractions due to challenging advertising markets.
Korea and India continue to dominate the landscape, collectively accounting for 80 per cent of total content investment in 2023. Korea, a mature market, is expected to see flat overall growth, with expansion in streaming and film offset by TV’s secular decline. In contrast, India, with its relatively low 52 per cent TV household penetration, presents significant growth potential across all verticals through 2028. MPA projects that India will surpass Korea in total content investment by 2026.
Looking ahead, MPA forecasts a 2.7 per cent CAGR in total content investment across the seven markets, reaching $17.2 billion by 2028. This growth will be predominantly driven by India, with Indonesia and the Philippines also expected to show decent growth rates. Korea and Thailand are anticipated to experience limited growth, while Vietnam faces the most challenges due to weak TV advertising and rampant piracy.
The investment landscape is evolving, with TV (free-to-air and pay) still commanding the lion’s share at 64 per cent in 2023, followed by streaming at 26 per cent and film at 10 per cent. By 2028, TV is projected to retain over 50 per cent of industry investment, while streaming is expected to increase its share to 33 per cent, with film marginally growing to 11 per cent.
MPA vice president Stephen Laslocky offered insights on the shifting content dynamics:
“Korean content continues to lead the pack with world-class production values and compelling storytelling, though we’re seeing online original content costs inflate to as much as US$7 million per episode. Its extraordinary appeal is evident, accounting for over 30 per cent of content demand in Southeast Asia and Taiwan. The rise of streaming has significantly elevated storytelling and production quality, particularly in Thailand and Indonesia, where competition is intensifying. We’re seeing content from these countries, especially Thai titles, gaining traction across Asia.
It’s become clear that many traditional TV drama producers are struggling to compete with higher-end streamed video content. In contrast, quality film producers have embraced the flexibility of streaming and adapted with greater ease. Over the past year, as some ad revenues have permanently shifted to digital and streaming behaviour has become entrenched, we’ve observed TV production margins contracting across most markets. For online originals, streamers have become much more disciplined in their approach to budgeting and content strategy.”
The report also highlights significant trends in online video consumption. YouTube leads with over a billion monthly active users across the surveyed markets, with 732 million in India alone. TikTok has emerged as a formidable competitor in Southeast Asia, boasting 211 million total monthly active users across Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand.
In the premium VOD space, Netflix maintains a strong lead in most markets, capturing between 40-70 per cent of viewership in Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. However, it faces stiff competition in Thailand from TrueID and in India from Disney+ Hotstar and Jio Cinema. Local players like Indonesia’s Vidio are also making their mark, while regional platforms such as Viu are leveraging Korean content and strategic partnerships to strengthen their positions.
The theatrical sector is still in recovery mode, with superhero franchise fatigue and Hollywood strikes delaying a return to pre-pandemic levels in most markets. India has already bounced back, with 2023 box office revenues exceeding 2019 figures. Other markets, excluding Korea, are expected to recover over the 2025-28 period. An emerging trend in film distribution sees a shift towards revenue-share models for internationally appealing titles, presenting new opportunities for Korean and Thai producers in particular.
As the APAC content landscape continues to evolve, the interplay between traditional and emerging platforms, coupled with changing consumer behaviours, will shape the industry’s future. The MPA report underscores the dynamic nature of the market and the critical importance of adaptability and strategic investment in driving growth across the region.
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.
