Full Stream Ahead

As Indians consume more digital content, video-streaming players are battling it out for eyeballs and real estate on smartphones. Who will emerge the winner?

- Jui Mukherjee

IT’S JUST ANOTHER DAY’S commute to work. You’re jostling for the last available seat on a bus or train as dozens of people around you sit completely immersed in their smartphones. Until recently, people bent over their phones were mostly swiping left and right for games like Candy Crush and online poker. But now you spot one person watching a Korean high school drama, another binge-watching a British crime procedural, and yet another catching a live football game in a different time zone.

What changed? For starters, data became cheaper and smartphones became more accessible, enabling Indians to explore the ocean of content available online. And video streaming companies, known in business parlance as over-the-top (OTT) players, immediately pounced on the opportunity to potentially grab a billion eyeballs. A Nielsen report on smartphone usage in India titled ‘What Handsets Say About Consumers’ called video-streaming apps among the most engaging on a smartphone, accounting for over 50% of the time spent on a phone along with social networking, browsers, and image apps. A recent Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report pointed out that the Indian OTT market, which stands at about $0.5 billion, will grow to $5 billion by 2023 with rising affluence, higher data penetration into rural areas, and rising adoption across demographics driving this growth.

Now, what does OTT mean? Quite simply, it is a term for players who deliver content via the Internet without the involvement of traditional channels such as satellite TV or a telecom network. The advent of OTT services in India effectively began with the launch of Star India’s Hotstar in 2015. Cut to 2019 and India has around 35 OTT players, all vying for the attention of the same set of consumers. Global giants like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have already grabbed a huge share of the pie, but indigenous players are not far behind.