Mobile- The New 'Entertainment' Battleground

Rise of mobile-based content, and how it is changing the game for the entertainment industry

- Abhesh Verma

India has always been crazy for entertainment – remember the deserted streets on Sundays when families used to gather and watch popular TV shows such as Ramayana and Mahabharata? However, times and consumers have changed since, and so have people’s preferences. Television is no longer the primary screen of content access for viewers; today’s digitally-empowered and ‘on-the-go’ consumers prefer to have their entertainment readily accessible to suit their lifestyles. Consequently, content viewing patternswithin the country have seen a marked shift towards mobility, as consumers gravitate towards accessing content which is not just digitally available but can also be consumed anytime, anywhere and on any device.

Much credit for the successful rise of the country’s digital entertainment & OTT content industry must be attributed to young India.With nearly 60 percent of the population under the age of 40, these mobile-first consumers have been amongst the early adopters of the smartphone revolution and have driven the country to become the world’s second largest smartphone population. These new-age viewers have also pretty much defined the way that the digital entertainment industry has evolved over the years, shifting as it has from TV to online and now from online to a mobility-centric platform.A recent paper published in the International Journal of Science, Technology & Management on ‘Advertising and OTT Content Services in India’ expectsthe contribution of video content in the mobile data consumption to increase to 40 percent by 2016. These findings are corroborated in the recent VNI Mobile Forecast 2015-2020 report from Cisco, which highlights that the Indian mobile video traffic will witness a CAGR of 83% between 2015 and 2020, and will account for nearly 50 percent of the total mobile data consumption by 2017.