iWorld
Net Neutrality: TRAI receives a million mails, Indians awaits judgment day
MUMBAI: One of the largest mass movements online in India came to an end as we crossed the 24 April, 2015 deadline day to send online responses to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
The Net Neutrality debate began after Indian telecom operators lobbied to TRAI to change certain rules as per their convenience, which would have a direct impact on the consumer’s pocket. TRAI, in response to the telecos on 27 March, released a 118-page long consultation bulletin, which concluded by asking 20 questions. The last date to respond to that bulletin electronically was 24 April, 2015 while all the counter responses could be sent till 8 May, 2015.
From 27 March to 24 April there have been certain incidents, which managed to ruffle quite a few big feathers. Many came on record to make a statement.
Some of the major developments throughout the net neutrality debate tenure are as follows:
All India Bakchod (AIB) Video
AIB’s video conveyed the message – “Internet is not a luxury but a utility” and the video ended with a link (www.netneutrality.in), which directed people to the net neutrality home page where all of TRAI’s 20 questions were answered in detail. One could send an email with the pre-written answers by a single click or could edit the replies and send it as well. The video saw the Internet savvy youth getting into action and a complex concept like net neutrality spread through word of mouth as thousands of mails were sent to the Authority.
Net Neutrality Website
www.netneutrality.in: After AIB’s video, thousands of people came to the website and mailed TRAI with the pre-written responses. The website also posted all the developments that were happening around the topic, tweets of dignitaries and most importantly the number of mails that were sent. The website also shared their perception which read, “The Internet’s success in fostering innovation, access to knowledge and freedom of speech is in large part due to the principle of net neutrality — the idea that Internet service providers give their customers equal access to all lawful websites and services on the Internet, without giving priority to any website over another.”
Internet.Org Backout
Internet.org is a Facebook-led initiative, which aims to bring five billion people online in partnership with tech giants like Samsung and Qualcomm. In India, Facebook partnered with Reliance Communications to provide free Internet access to 33 websites as part of its Internet.org initiative, which came under controversy and raised quite a few eyebrows with free Internet activists saying that it violated the idea of net neutrality. Major participants like Flipkart, Cleartrip, NDTV and Times Network, which had earlier joined this initiative, opted out later as the Net Neutrality debate gathered momentum in India.
NDTV co-founder Prannoy Roy tweeted, “NDTV is committed to Net Neutrality and is therefore exiting, and will not be part of Facebook’s Internet.org initiative.”
Mark Zukerberg’s letter
Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg wrote a note justifying the Internet.org initiative. It read, “In many countries, there are big social and economic obstacles to connectivity. The Internet isn’t affordable to everyone, and in many places awareness of its value remains low. Women and the poor are most likely to be excluded and further disempowered by lack of connectivity. This is why we created Internet.org, our effort to connect the whole world. By partnering with mobile operators and governments in different countries, Internet.org offers free access in local languages to basic Internet services in areas like jobs, health, education and messaging. Internet.org lowers the cost of accessing the Internet and raises the awareness of the Internet’s value. It helps include everyone in the world’s opportunities.”
He further added, “We fully support Net neutrality. We want to keep the Internet open. Net neutrality ensures network operators don’t discriminate by limiting access to services you want to use. It’s an essential part of the open Internet, and we are fully committed to it. But Net neutrality is not in conflict with working to get more people connected. These two principles — Net neutrality and universal connectivity — can and must coexist.”
TRAI chairman Rahul Khullar’s statement
“There are passionate voices on both sides of the debate. And if that was not enough, there’s a corporate war going on between a media house and a telecom operator, which is confounding already difficult matters,” Khullar told The Indian Express. “They have a moral anchor… Equally, there are others on the opposite side. But there are many others in between that one should not ignore despite the passionate nature of the debate between the two extremes. We need a democratic debate on the issue, not shrill voices,” he added
Sabka Internet Campaign
The battle for net neutrality in India saw an interesting twist after the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) launched a campaign called Sabka Internet. The Sabka Internet initiative was launched to counter the net neutrality campaign. The campaign communicated the positives of the zero Internet venture, where one gets whatever they pay for.
Million Mail Mission
In a span of 12 days, a million emails were sent and the ‘million mails’ mission of Netneutrality.in was accomplished before the due date. That sums up the entire net neutrality voyage.
Thank you to everyone who made this possible. Long way to go. With you we'll #SaveTheInternet. http://t.co/atNByduOJ2 pic.twitter.com/eJBwFJyA9x
— Net Neutrality India (@neutrality_in) April 23, 2015
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.
