By: Yohan P Chawla
Day two of Promax BDA India saw a power packed panel from the OTT industry who discussed the trends, learnings, the future of the OTT Industry and its eco-system. The session titled, OTT: To Infinity and Beyond, was moderated by Rajiv Bakshi, CEO, Big Synergy where he opened the panel with current facts about the OTT industry as a whole.
“The OTT industry is worth $5 Billion. The business models have evolved from AVOD to SVOD, the affordability of data and the mobile phone penetration in today’s time has given the industry the boost that it requires, and not to forget the reach which these OTT platforms have to Tier II and Tier III cities is massive.” said Bakshi.
On consolidation in the OTT space, Vijay Subramaniam, Head of Content, Amazon Prime Video said, “It is very early days for consolidation, there are about over 200 million people, out there who have not got the access to any streaming service.”
”From the context of making things available and what customers really care about, we at Amazon Prime Video, strongly believe in the quality of content itself and by that I mean the product, the UX and the convenience all being bundled in one. Second being value.”
“The more customers perceive Prime Video to provide great value, they are going to believe that it’s a must have service. So this is just the beginning of a long journey. We are not talking to just one India, we are talking to multiple Indians.”
Talking about the types of customers Shemaroo has, Zubin Dubash, COO, Shemaroo Entertaiment, said, “Shemaroo has been in the business of content since the past 5 decades across various platforms and genres. We have taken the all the learnings of the past 55 years and have created our OTT own platform ShemarooMe.”
“The beauty of our content is that it has been organically consumed over and over again. The consumption has been tremendous even on a platform like Youtube, where we get at least 3 million views a month. While looking at our watch time and views, we got a lot of insights about the huge base of customers who actually look at content from a very different angle. A set of customers look at new, fresh and original content. Whereas the other type of customers want to watch their favourite piece of content over and over again. And the best part about this is that people are willing to pay for content which they want to watch over and over again.”
Speaking about having a broadcaster advantage, Aparna Acharekar, Content Head, ZEE5, said, “Coming from a broadcaster, we definitely have a strategic advantage and we leverage the strength of the network. We have a huge consumer base that comes to the platform to catch up on the Zee network shows, IPL or no IPL, this just keeps growing, anything traditional has not affected our numbers at all. So yes, there is a strategic advantage, being from the house of a broadcaster.”
“MX Player is operating at a scale with 75 million daily active users and 175 million monthly active users, so we already have those consumers, and they already have our app on their phones, we just need to make them realize that there is a streaming option available on MX Player. India is a content hungry country. From the original content purview most people who have ever created original web series are our partners TVF, Dice, Pocket Aces etcetera which provide original content to our audiences.” Said, GautamTalwar, Chief Content Officer, MX Player.
Speaking about the customers’ willingness to pay for content, Ali Hussein, COO, Eros Digital, said, “It is important to identify what you believe consumers will be willing to pay for and there are consumers who are not ready to pay for a certain type of content. Eros now has a content library with IPs over 12,000 films, across many languages has the biggest repository to dip into the consumer’s pocket to demand a subscription price and that’s the reason why we are servicing to customers not only in India but to about 135 countries from across the world.”
“While we are primarily a streaming service, we don’t have the added advantage of a broadcaster whose primary business runs after television reach on GEC audiences across the country, which is run by subscription and advertising.”
