iWorld
Reliance Jio to roll out 5G services in major cities by Diwali
Mumbai: On Monday, at the 45th annual general meeting, Reliance Industries announced that Jio has prepared an ambitious 5G roll-out plan, which is claimed to be the fastest in the world.
Using immersive and interactive metaverse technology, Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani addressed the shareholders at the AGM and made the announcement.
The chairman’s statement also said that they have made a total investment of two 2 lakh crore rupees.
He said, “Within the next two months, by Diwali, we will launch Jio 5G across multiple key cities, including the metropolises of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai. Subsequently, we plan to increase the Jio 5G footprint month after month.”
“By December 2023, which is less than 18 months from today, we will deliver Jio 5G to every town, every taluka, and every tehsil of our country,” he added.
The company unveiled the AirFiber, a wireless plug-and-play 5G hotspot that does not require fibre cables and provides a personal Wi-Fi hotspot at home or in the office.
Reliance Jio chairman Akash Ambani said, “Jio 5G is an ultra-high-speed fixed-broadband. Since you get ber-like speeds over the air without any wires, we are calling it JioAirFiber. With JioAirFiber, it will be really easy to quickly connect your home or office to Gigabit-speed Internet. We have developed a JioAirFiber Home Gateway, which is a wireless, simple, single-device solution.”
Mukesh Ambani further added, “Digital Freedom is the birthright of every Indian. Therefore, 5G cannot remain an exclusive service, available only to the privileged few or only to those in our largest cities. To build our pan-India true 5G network, we have committed.”
“We are working with Google to develop ultra-affordable 5G smartphones for India. We will also leverage the advanced capabilities of Google Cloud to offer Jio’s private 5G stack and other 5G-enabled solutions to both domestic and global users at scale,” said Akash Ambani.
Jio has 421 million mobile broadband subscribers on their 4G network, and according to the company, they consume, on average, nearly 20 GB of broadband data every month, nearly doubling their consumption from the year before.
Jio’s pan-India fibre-optic network is more than 11 lakh kilometres in length.
“We will use our combined wireless and wireline assets to cover 3.3 million square kilometres, India’s total land mass, with fibre-quality broadband, connecting even those parts of the country where satellite technology was the only option,” said Mukesh Ambani.
The company has deployed the Made-In-India 5G stack in their network, with sufficient capacity to serve hundreds of millions of users right from day one.
“Using 5G technology, we can dramatically reduce latency or lag, and deliver breakthrough increases in broadband speed, network capacity, and the number of connected users,” said Mukesh Ambani.
According to Reliance Jio, the main objective is to roll out top-quality, highly affordable fixed broadband services to hundreds of millions of locations in a very short period of time.
Jio believes it could expand broadband availability to further stimulate the adoption of connected intelligent solutions across all walks of life.
Mukesh Ambani said, “We will connect over 100 million homes with unparalleled digital experiences and smart home solutions. We will catapult tens of millions of small merchants and small businesses to great heights, empowering them with cutting-edge, plug-and-play solutions delivered from the cloud. We will provide millions of medium-sized businesses with the same digital capabilities that were earlier available only to larger companies.”
“We will accelerate the digital transformation of tens of thousands of our large enterprises and make them globally competitive. And we will launch billions of smart sensors with connected intelligence that will trigger the internet of things and fuel the fourth industrial revolution,” he concluded.
In FY22. Reliance Industries has continued to make all-around progress across its businesses. The company became India’s first corporate to cross $100 billion in annual revenues. Reliance’s consolidated revenues grew 47 per cent to Rs 7.93 lakh crore. Reliance’s annual consolidated Ebitda crossed a crucial milestone of Rs 1.25 lakh crore.
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.
