iWorld
SonyLIV banked on Akamai to leverage ad insertion for India-SA series
MUMBAI: SonyLIV, which provides multi-screen engagement to users on all devices, leveraged Akamai’s dynamic ad-insertion capabilities during the India-South Africa cricket series held over January and February 2018.
Akamai Technologies regional VP, media Asia Pacific and Japan Sidharth Pisharoti said, “SonyLIV has a vast library of original content. However, in India, few entertainment options have the capability to attract mass audiences like cricket. While the challenge on the one hand is to keep audiences engaged with a TV-like experience, the equally hard part is ensuring that advertisers see value in leveraging digital platforms to drive views and consequently, revenue through advertisements. With Akamai’s capabilities, we were able to successfully deliver what audiences and advertisers wanted over the course of the India-South Africa series.”
SonyLIV was the official and exclusive mobile and internet broadcaster for the India tour of South Africa series and delivered it to millions of users seamlessly across a variety of devices. Digital advertisers gained the most through the course of the series with Akamai’s dynamic ad insertion delivering targeted advertisements during the live stream. With this partnership, SonyLIV achieved a near 100 per cent ad fill rate without compromising on the viewing experience for users.
Commenting on the partnership, SonyLIV EVP and business head Uday Sodhi said, “The India Tour of South Africa series was a huge success for SonyLIV and our audiences had a seamless experience throughout. We partnered with Akamai and leveraged their technology and added it to our already existing capabilities. The series was a huge hit with all the brands we associated with.”
Pitch Madison’s Advertising Report for 2018 projects advertising spend on digital platforms to reach Rs 11,629 crore in 2018, representing a 19.5 per cent increase over the Rs 9,303 crore spent in 2017. In 2017, the spend on mobile was 78 per cent (Rs 7,256 crore) of the total digital outlay. Video represented 35 per cent (Rs 3,300 crore) of the total spend. This indicates a strong reflection of growing consumer trends in the country. A report by MoMagic Technologies found that 40 per cent of Indians prefer to watch advertisement videos on their mobile phones over other media. Additionally, as per IDC, India is the fastest growing smart phone market globally with a total of 124 million units shipped in 2017.
Powered by advertising technology expert Yospace, Akamai’s dynamic ad insertion is designed to help content providers offer greater monetisation opportunities through online advertising, while maintaining a TV-like experience for viewers at scale.
Also Read:
2017: The year OTTs went regional in India
Regional OTT content more than just catch-up TV
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.
