With the overall variety of content out on various platforms, experts believe it is going to rake in a lot more Indian subscribers. True, currently there are not many subscribers for many of these platforms in India, but their viewership has been increasing since the introduction of smart-phones and has only been boosted by the lockdown.
With smart phones being cheap and in the hands of a lot of adults (and children) and the rise of 4G networking, many OTT companies have offered cheaper variants for the small screen to interest viewers in converting to subscribers. Netflix and Zee5 are two of the few companies who have done this so with varying degrees of success.
Data companies have started partnering up with multiple OTT platform companies like Netflix, Amazon and Hotstar to make live sports and movies available to the data user in the form of ‘data-bundles’. Data companies pay a certain amount per customer each time they access an OTT platform’s content. In most cases, data users doesn’t realize that they are actually paying for the content and not the data. As many as 260 million consumers watched video content through these ‘data-bundles’ in 2019.
Mobile subscriptions will only keep increasing as more and more of the Indian population consumes video over smart-phones. OTTs have fairly broken into the urban market and now needs to increase it’s subscriber base. And with the current trend, the question is merely how much greater will it grow? .