By Shaun Lim
People are watching shorter content than ever before, yet content consumption has never been higher. Popularised by platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, short-form content, which can last anywhere from a few seconds to three minutes, is being consumed voraciously by mobile-first audiences, particularly across South-east Asia.
According to the Digital 2025: April Statshot report by We Are Social and Meltwater, Internet users in South-east Asia rank among the world’s top consumers of short-form video content. Users in the Philippines spend nearly 10.5 hours weekly watching short-form videos, with the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia all ranking in the global top five for the average number of days per week spent watching short online videos.
One of the key drivers of this shift in content consumption has undoubtedly been microdrama, which originated in China around 2018 and has since morphed into a multibillion-dollar global phenomenon.
The easy assumption about South-east Asia’s microdrama market is that it mirrors China at an earlier stage of development. Data from RisingJoy, a Singapore-based micro-entertainment company specialising in the licensing and distribution of high-performance microdrama titles to platforms and apps worldwide, tells a different story.
“South-east Asia behaves differently, and demographics are the main reason,” Cassandra Yang, Co-Founder & CEO, RisingJoy, told APB+. “This is a much younger region, and younger audiences consume differently.”
Two distinctions stand out. In China, while platform algorithms drive content discovery, peer recommendations and influencer triggers do the job in South-east Asia. The second is taste. While Chinese audiences gravitate towards fantasy and historical romance, younger South-east Asian viewers want to see their own lives reflected on screen. “They want themselves on screen, not a costume drama set somewhere else,” said Yang.
These insights shape how RisingJoy approaches its South-east Asian expansion. Rather than planting its own flag in every market, the company commits to a go-local model, working through platform partners who bring audience relationships, payment infrastructure, and cultural knowledge that no outsider could replicate quickly.
After successfully launching RJOY, a direct-to-consumer micro-entertainment streaming service, to audiences in the US and Japan via TikTok Minis this June, RisingJoy recently inked new partnerships with Astro’s Sooka streaming service in Malaysia and IDN App in Indonesia.
“Sooka and IDN App bring the audience relationships, the built-in payment rails and the cultural read,” Yang explained. “We bring the content engine and the format know-how. Neither side moves this fast alone.”
Building a studio, not just a catalogue
RisingJoy is undergoing a significant strategic transition, moving from a licensing and distribution model towards becoming a full-service micro-entertainment studio with original IP and co-production at its core.
“Becoming a studio uses a completely different muscle,” said Yang. “Distribution is about moving content that already exists. A studio is in the storytelling business, which means owning development, production and the IP itself.”
The most fundamental shift, she says, is about how RisingJoy thinks about time. “As a licensing business you think in months — what’s hot now, what can I place this quarter.
“As a studio you have to think in years, because the IP you create today is what you’ll adapt, franchise and monetise down the line.”
Central to this ambition is RisingJoy’s work with strategic partner and investor Double Vision on what they call micro-format bibles, which the companies plan to co-develop a slate of 30 microdrama frameworks over the coming months.
These are detailed production frameworks that go beyond individual scripts to map out character beats, plot structures, visual grammar, and the hooks that keep audiences watching.
“Production costs drop because you’re not reinventing the format each time, testing gets cheaper because you can validate an idea before you shoot it, and you come away holding an asset rather than a one-off,” Yang explained.
Beyond the shift in business model, RisingJoy is also navigating how AI fits into its content creation and localisation workflows, and where the line between technology and human judgement should sit.
Across its content spanning Chinese, English, Korean, and AI-original formats, RisingJoy adapts story structure, pacing, and cultural texture market by market. There is also a clear distinction between translating language and adapting culture, as Yang explained, “Translating the language is the easy part. Adapting the culture is the real job, and the two need different tools.”
AI plays a role in both, but a very different one in each. In content creation, it assists in spotting trends, flagging pacing issues, and sketching rough outlines while creative direction, character design, and emotional beats remain human decisions. In localisation, AI does significantly heavier lifting, handling translation, dialogue retiming, and cultural reference adjustments at a scale that manual processes could not reach.
“Everything it produces still gets a human pass before it ships,” Yang emphasised. “AI gets us about 80% of the way, fast and affordably, and the last 20% is human, which is the 20% that decides whether a title actually works.
“AI buys us speed and scale; people protect the quality and the cultural read. The whole point is that our AI-assisted titles shouldn’t feel manufactured. If a viewer can tell, we’ve failed.”
A connector, not a disruptor
As microdrama continues to rise in popularity, traditional broadcasters and streamers should not see micro-entertainment as a rival product or as a complementary content layer. Instead, micro-entertainment represents a shift in how an entire generation has been trained to watch. “Short-form, vertical and mobile-first is the default for younger viewers now. That’s not a niche to keep an eye on, it’s the baseline,” Yang said.
Yet she is equally clear that short-form is not here to replace long-form content. “They do different jobs,” she said. “Microdrama has already proven it can generate revenue, but the part people underrate is what it does upstream.
“It’s an acquisition funnel and a cheap, fast way to test which stories and characters land before you commit real money to a long-form version. Done well, it gives you a data-backed IP pipeline feeding broadcast and streaming.
“That’s the shift that matters.”
The choice, she argued, lies with the incumbent. “Treat microdrama as a rival product fighting your shows for the same hour and yes, it’s a threat. Treat it as the top of your funnel — the thing that brings a 22-year-old into your ecosystem in the first place — and it becomes one of the most useful tools you have.”
The players who succeed, she added, will be those who use micro-entertainment to acquire younger audiences, build the habit, and graduate them into premium long-form content over time.
“That’s how we see our role: the connector,” said Yang. “We help traditional players meet their next generation of viewers where they already are, rather than waiting for that audience to come back to a screen they’ve already left.”