India has invariably been a price sensitive market for most industries including the food and beverages industry, clothing / textile industry, and FMCG etc. And the entertainment / OTT industry is no exception.
Several big shot OTT players like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, SonyLIV, and Jio Cinema are competing with each other in the cutthroat streaming world. Jio Cinema has even gone to the extent of offering premium titles for free. Although this excludes HBO and some other foreign content for which paid subscription is needed. Nevertheless, this free OTT content strategy must have put a lot of pressure on rival streaming platforms.
Now, what if we consider a scenario where any of the aforementioned Indian OTT platforms starts offering content similar to the payment system of a mobile postpaid plan instead of the existing pre-paid styled plans. Let’s explain it further.
Through this hypothetical post-paid OTT model, subscribers can be charged on the basis of how many hours of content they actually consume during the billing period, say, during a month or a week. Don’t confuse this with the rental / PPV model which is already being offered by Prime Video & BookMyShow Stream etc.
For example, a Netflix subscriber User A consumes OTT content on the platform only during post office hours and during the weekends. Say, he watches about ten hours of content on the OTT platform per week. So, he can be charged only for the actual hours of content he has watched and not for Netflix’s entire portfolio (more than 90% of which remains unconsumed in many cases). This payment system will give an OTT viewer the advantage of paying only for that content which he has consumed instead of paying for the remaining 90% unwatched content.
And in case another viewer User B, who is a hardcore binge-watcher, consumes twenty hours of OTT content per week, then he will be charged double of what User A was charged for the same period. And it is expected that the net amount paid to the OTT platform averages out eventually. So, even the OTT platform might benefit from it in the longer term.
This way, OTT subscribers can be charged on the basis of the amount of content streamed per billing period. Just like a mobile postpaid plan. Sounds fair, doesn’t it? But there is one problem – assurance of payment of money by the subscriber to the OTT platform because the money will be paid after the completion of the billing cycle and after the content has been consumed.
A potential solution to this problem could be the mandatory usage and blockage of credit cards so that post-paid styled payment to the OTT platform is assured. Alternatively, OTT platforms can also use a wallet mode through which payment from subscribers can be deducted after the weekly or monthly billing cycle is completed. What’s your thought on an Indian OTT platform moving to a mobile post-paid like payment option or its users? Can it be a win-win situation for both OTT viewers and the streaming platforms?
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