iWorld
Video piracy continues to worry industry: Frost & Sullivan
NEW DELHI: Discussions about piracy are abound and media companies are worried on how to stem it. Companies need to drive all their energies towards making a diverse portfolio of content and services available that can appeal to viewers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
As per the findings of a White Paper on the ‘Trends in Broadcast and New Media Video in Middle East and North Africa’ by Frost & Sullivan, video consumption in the MENA region has increased in recent times as a result of content availability on alternative media besides television. With the availability of localised online content and targeted on-demand services for the diaspora on the rise, traditional broadcasters and service operators are exploring new avenues and services to retain the fickle modern viewer.
Frost & Sullivan is the knowledge Partner for CABSAT 2015 slated from 10 – 12 March at the Dubai World Trade Centre. The White paper is an industry outlook covering key findings on market penetration, type of content, leading companies in the region, drivers and restraints, technology and market trends, business models and some case studies.
Frost & Sullivan research director – digital media Vidya S Nath said, “The region offers rich potential with a few countries ranking among the highest digital television and high-speed internet penetration in the world.”
Frost & Sullivan finds that satellite television will continue to dominate the region’s linear television services over the next three years. High Definition (HD) TV channels will continue to grow swiftly by at least over 25 per cent over the next three years, while content companies will likely start offering 4K video content over IPTV soon. With the region waiting for HEVC-compliant set-top boxes to increase support of next generation television services, international mega events including the FIFA World Cup in 2022 in Qatar will boost the penetration of Ultra High Definition Smart TVs to about 50 per cent of households in 2020.
Correspondingly, there is an active growth in viewership trends for video over alternative platforms, social media and mobile networks – with Frost & Sullivan urging all broadcasters and service providers to prioritise the segment now. The proliferation of localised content across all genres for different diaspora – especially news and current affairs – continues on various portals, while all leading regional public and private broadcasters have launched dedicated social media presences through platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin to capture a younger demographic of viewers. For the next three years, there needs to be a focus on personalised viewing, acceleration of multiscreen services and multimedia advertising. Content producers and aggregators seek innovative solutions for compression, ad-insertion, video-on-demand, media asset management, and digital rights management that can help them centralise their multimedia operations and unify it with their linear television workflows.
Many media networks and content companies struggle with the region’s bipolar and fragmented trends, across the region. While most of the GCC countries are highly mature in new media consumption, the rest of the region continues to experience fractured network speeds and stringent regulatory frameworks. Constant innovation in packaging content and advertising will help in achieving heightened video penetration.
CABSAT show director Andrew Pert added, “As the leading platform for the broadcast, production, content delivery, digital media and satellite sectors across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia (MEASA), CABSAT is at the forefront of delivering dialogue between global media and entertainment organisations and their local counterparts on how best to drive innovation into their businesses and content offerings. With regional consumers’ video content consumption among the world’s highest per capita, the convergence of international broadcast, film, production, internet, telecom and consumer electronics sectors has resulted in strategic investment inroads and monetisation avenues being rife across the MENA market – CABSAT is the gateway to capitalising on regional opportunities.”
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.
