While Amazon’s video streaming service has received an overwhelming response, the company wants to keep adding content that is more relevant to Indian viewers. It is looking at adding original content in regional languages.
And within the country, there are many languages and tastes can differ from region to region. Apart from expanding its existing customer base, Amazon has to contend with a host of other competitors, including home-grown Indian companies and this requirement for adding local content becomes lot more critical.
It has to be acknowledged that Amazon Prime, though launched by the company in many countries, has seen maximum success in the Indian market. Apart from English, Amazon Prime offers content in 5 Indian languages currently. Amazon sees potential in the Southern part of the country, with Tamil and Telugu content already being offered, besides Hindi. These are mostly movies and shows. They may now have to start looking at adding originals in the regional languages also, which the company is yet to enter into.
As is known, Amazon offers its Prime membership for an annual fee of Rs 999 (which was earlier Rs 499) and the subscribers are entitled to faster and free deliveries of products they order on Amazon (in most cases, next day delivery), earlier access to attractive offers in the ecommerce sight as well as video and music streaming services.
There is a market projection that the online media and entertainment business could jump by over 35% in a couple of years from the $22.7 billion seen in 2017 to over $31 billion. One major reason being cited for this is the cheaper availability of data being provided by the telecom companies in India.
Amazon’s competitors in the Indian online media streaming business include Netflix, Hotstar (Twentieth Century Fox), Voot (a Joint venture between Network 18 and Viacom Inc, USA), Sony LIV, OZee (Zee Entertainment of the Zee TV group) and ALT Balaji (Balaji Entertainment). This is a formidable line-up and another area Amazon is yet to fully explore is the live-streaming of sports events.
For its part Amazon claims to have taken baby steps in this space, by streaming the US Football games to global subscribers and it may take a while for the company to get the grips of the trade in this segment.