A Regional Ride

Regional content will play a significant role in taking the OTT video players to the last mile in India and establishing growth

- Ashish Sinha & Ruhail Amin

ONE OF THE DIRECT fallouts of the growth in the OTT (over the top) video story in India is the lag between the preference of the audience and the content to serve this audience. The growth in platforms such as YouTube and the rise of video on social media platforms, injected by the strength in mobile, created the demand for digital video consumption, but it also made apparent the dearth of content to match.

In the last two years, it has become evident audiences in India are seeking deeprooted, longer-format content online as well. According to OTT player Hotstar, 96 percent of watch time on it comes from videos longer than 20 minutes.

Room for growth

According to EY, online video audiences in India are expected to cross 500 million by 2020. India’s pay TV video OTT is also set to evolve with this. A FICCI EY 2018 report, in fact, says that digital video subscription market size alone would be upwards of Rs 20 billion in 2020, which would be a 73 percent CAGR increase from 2017.

Data shows that 8-10 million viewers in India do not watch Indian TV content as it does not appeal to them. Digital is trying to differentiate and capture these early adopters but Indian TV content is not ‘premium’ and has less library value compared to developed markets as per IDFC research. Digital video OTTs, excluding the likes of YouTube, together have created less than 150 titles exclusively for the Indian market, which is less than 410 hours of content.

This pales in comparison to the number of fresh hours programmed every week on Indian television.

A significant change is on the horizon though. Various OTTs have fresh premium content lined up and announced projects could total another 200 hours.