The making of a content king

The Hotstar-Jio combine will upend the OTT ecosystem

- CHRISTINA MONIZ

'CONTENT IS KING' is a cliche but any publisher that swears by the motto has the ability to attract and retain customers, engendering brand loyalty.

Post-merger, the Disney Star and Viacom18 combine will straightaway command a digital OTT (over-the-top) market share of 34% in terms of ad revenue. A Bloomberg report citing Comscore data estimated that in January, nearly 243.5 million users that's a 46.5% share of streaming viewership excluding Youtube visitors thronged the three streaming platforms of Disney's Hotstar and Reliance's JioCinema and JioTV. What it will also own now is a key category differentiator - a robust content library. Ergo, a bigger monetisation opportunity.

"The merging of the two will have some disruptive consequences in terms of content and pricing power," says Santosh N, managing partner at D&P Advisory. He adds, "Hotstar is the best among the homegrown streaming apps. It had a strong content game even before the merger, even though it lost some marquee content in the last year or so. Jio is the player with big pockets and aspirations, but it is still new in this space and so doesn't have any major original content and the app is still not as good as Hotstar's."