The OTT market to explode in India with 5G

Whether it’s live streaming or TV series, the almost 600 million Indians who own smartphones are increasingly watching their favourite shows on their phones, providing a much-needed boost to the country’s OTT platforms.

In the two years since the outbreak, daily material consumption has only increased, from YouTube to Netflix and Zee5 to MX Player.

According to app intelligence business App Annie, Indians are currently spending up to five hours on their smartphones, and streaming is becoming an important part of their lives for millions of people, including those in rural India.

OTT consumption and smartphones, according to Tarun Pathak, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, go hand in hand. The video streaming business in India has skyrocketed, mainly to Reliance Jio’s ultra-cheap data plans, with more than 65 percent of video usage coming from rural India, where Internet availability is approximately 40 percent.

According to reports, established streaming service providers have revised their strategy for the Indian market due to the broadening of the traditional audience in the streaming space, the popularity of international content (such as Korean or Spanish) in India, and the ability to attract a wider audience through subtitles and dubbed content.

Netflix lowered the price of its OTT services in India by 60% in December 2021, bringing the base plan to Rs 199 per month.

Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ Hotstar, on the other hand, increased their monthly subscription costs somewhat. In the first quarter of 2022, Walt Disney’s streaming service Disney+ Hotstar added 2.6 million paid users in India, bringing its overall base to 45.9 million.

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video do not provide country-specific statistics. According to a recent CII-BCG report, India had 70-80 million paying OTT users at the end of 2021, up from 14 million in 2018. According to Gregory K. Peters, Netflix’s COO and Chief Product Officer, the company is learning more about Indian consumers’ preferences, which is widening the service’s offers in a variety of ways.

India, the world’s third-largest 5G smartphone market, saw roughly 30 million 5G-ready handsets in 2021, up from just 3 million in 2020. Over the next five years, total smartphone shipments in the country are predicted to exceed 1.7 billion, generating a market worth almost $250 billion, with nearly 840 million 5G handsets expected to be sold.

When generating material, content makers will look beyond network limits, especially in ultra-high definition with low latency.

This, according to Pathak, can drive even more innovation and make OTT a highly competitive sector, especially when everyone is vying for a larger portion of users’ time.

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