India’s streaming landscape is ever evolving and to keep up with the pace, the streaming platforms will need to evolve too if they wish to stay in the game for long in the world’s most populated country where opportunities are endless and so are the challenges. One such magnanimous challenge is the low percentage of directly paid subscribers in respect to the number of users having access to premium content.
According to latest data, while a staggering 150.6 million users in the country have access to paid content through subscription-based video on demand (SVoD) services, yet, only 39.3 million of these users have directly paid for at least one subscription.
Now this striking difference between people actually footing the bill and those benefiting even without paying reflects many things about the Indian audience and their streaming consumption habits, demographic realities and cultural attitude.
India’s population is diverse and it plays a key role in shaping the streaming and paying behaviour in many ways. Firstly there’s this deep socio-economic divide which is a major driving force. The Indian middle class is busy making ends meet in this inflated economy, and paying for subscriptions on an individual basis is more of a burden than recreation for them. Moreover, wide availability of ad based or free entertainment further discourages paid subscriptions.
Indians have relied on television as their main source of entertainment for long now and with services like DTH, they have had to pay small amounts to get a wide variety of channels when compared to global standards. The same preference for inexpensive or free content has shifted to digital platforms now.
Moreover, this and previous generation has grown up watching television where advertisements were part of the entertainment. And therefore getting accustomed to AVoD models, where content is interrupted by advertisements, is not very difficult for the Indian audience.
Secondly, there’s this large youthful demographic in India where a significant portion of the population is under the age of 30, that prefers to consume digital content over the traditional satellite television. However, much of this young population is not financially independent and often relies on family or shared subscriptions for access to premium content.
In addition to the above factors, there has been a sort of price war when it comes to streaming in India where platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, ZEE5, and others are vying for viewers’ attention and are hence offering aggressive discounts or subscription bundles.
Not only this, there are various family plans and account-sharing on platforms which have further reduced the need for individual users to pay for their own subscriptions. And hence the culture of shared accounts is quite pervasive in India. Sometimes not just one household but even extended family members and friends share a single subscription. Looks like us Indians take sharing is caring too seriously!
There’s one more reason for such low numbers of real paid subscribers in India and that is the free or discounted subscriptions offered by telecom companies such as Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone-Idea through their mobile data plans. The users of these networks gain access to premium content without actually having to paying for it. This does increase the user base of the SVoD platforms but it also inflates the number of users with access to premium content while in reality the percentage of paying customers remains low.
India is unique and so is its streaming ecosystem. The significant disparity between the number of users with access to paid content and those actually paying though troublesome also shows the wide and deep reach of the streaming platforms. The real challenge now is to convert this reach into direct revenue. And as we said India’s unique, addressing its unique challenges is the key. Focus on cultural, economic, and behavioral factors at play is the way forward to survive in the Indian SVoD market which will gradually and hopefully result in a shift towards a more robust, paying customer base.
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