iWorld
Telecom Italia & Rupert Murdoch’s Sky partner for Internet TV service
MUMBAI: Fibre-optic cable TV has landed in Italy as part of a strategic partnership between Telecom Italia and Rupert Murdoch’s Sky. The companies will be sharing their assets and their respective expertise to bring forth a key business project that will also boost ultra-broadband demand in Italy.
With this partnership, the two companies take a crucial step forward towards “convergence” between media and TLC, as the deal makes way for the first “quadruple play” offer in Italy, integrating landline and mobile services, broadband and ultra-broadband connectivity and premium television content available “anytime and anywhere” on all Internet-connected devices.
The excellence of content and the uniqueness of Sky’s viewing experience turn into drivers for spreading TIM’s ultra-broadband and, at the same time, the access to Telecom Italia’s latest generation networks allows Sky to benefit from a new distribution platform for its content and services offer.
The initiative strengthens TIM’s strategy in distributing innovative services and confirms its role as technology enabler thanks to very high-speed networks, thus bringing more and more households closer to the very quality of content and the new modes to enjoy the Sky-branded viewing experience.
Similarly, the agreement with Telecom Italia does carry a strategic meaning for Sky too, as it makes all its wide-ranging offer of programs and exclusive services available on broadband and on ultra-broadband networks as well thus extending pay TV scope to reach out, for example, those prospects who reside in the city centers of the many Italian art cities and cannot install the satellite dish and therefore access Italy’s best TV offer.
The TIM Sky joint offer will be available for TIM’s private customers with a fibre-optic connection from 30 to 100 Mbit/s and 20 Mbit/s ADSL.
With TIM’s broadband and ultra-broadband networks, Sky’s television offer and user experience will equal those available via satellite. An offering featuring more than 150 channels, with all the quality of HD (about 60 HD channels and one 3D channel) and with all the innovative features that make viewing experience unique, from Sky On Demand, the video-library with more than 2500 titles to be watched at any time, to Restart, the service enabling subs to restart a movie already on air from the very beginning. All the other My Sky HD features allowing customers to record their favorite programs, pause a live show or watch again whatever scene with the replay, will be active within the summer.
For the first year, the TIM Sky offer will be proposed, as a promotion, starting from €14 per month for users already with fibre or ADSL connectivity and from €39 per month for a quadruple play package (internet landline and mobile, voice and TV content).
Telecom Italia CEO Marco Patuano said, “Today, in Italy, with Sky, we are starting a new collaboration model between Telco and Media Companies that allows us to go to the market with a fully convergent offer. We are convinced that this strategic deal is an important driver for the development of the new ultra-broadband networks and of the innovative technologies that are at the core of our business plan featuring more than 5 billion euros investments for the three years period 2015-2017. We are particularly pleased with this partnership as it allows our customers to access exclusive and high quality content thanks to Telecom Italia’s technological expertise and Sky’s editorial richness.”
“This partnership is an example of how two leading companies, that have always been investing in innovation, can join together to create something that until recently was not even possible in Italy, therefore boosting demand, so far only potential, for quality pay TV also through ultra-broadband. From now on Telecom Italia’s fibre will bring all the richness of content and the excellence of Sky’s viewing experience, with HD, on demand, Restart, My Sky features, into the houses of millions of Italian families who, for various reasons, could not install a dish. Sky is currently present on all the main distribution platforms and this agreement does carry a strong strategic value for us as it broadens Sky’s commercial prospects base. To understand its importance just think that in the UK almost 20% of households enjoy a pay TV offer through cable or broadband,” added Sky Italia CEO Andrea Zappia.
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.
