Amazon Prime Video, which is a subscription-based VOD (video-on-demand) platform, was launched in India in December 2016. It boasts of over 9.5 million active subscribers (Source: FICCI-KPMG 2017 Report; as on January 2017) and ranks at third position after Hotstar (63 million) and Voot (13.2 million), in India. Nitesh Kripalani, Director and country head of Amazon Video India in an exclusive interview given to afaqs talks about the impact Amazon Prime Video has had in reducing piracy in India among other things.
Here are some highlights of the interview:
When asked what makes the Indian market unique, Kripalani said that the Indian population is young and more mobile-focused that offers each of the unique data points, the opportunity for localizing, thanks to the fast growth of mobile broadband that is growing more rapidly than fixed broadband. 95 percent of Indian consumers are on prepaid plans with a fixed cap of 4GB or 8GB data consumption whereas at home the broadband consumption could be 50-60 GB a month.
So according to him, managing playback and quality is a unique challenge. For content consumption, Kripalani stated that people preferred viewing content in local language, involving local stars. In India, apart from 20 official languages, including dialects, the number may cross 1,000. Amazon Prime India’s focus has been offering customers content in various languages such as English, Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, Bengali and Marathi which has made it unique. Soon after a movie’s theatrical release, customers would like to view the new releases, so piracy is very high in India and the challenge Amazon Prime India is facing is to convince people that they can view new video content without having to pirate content. So, there has been a decline in digital content piracy since the launch.
To read the entire interview please click here.
