Rohan MathawanIndia has become the latest and one of the biggest battlegrounds on which established international brands are attempting to win over a chunk of the audience and bring them onto their entertainment streaming platforms.
Streaming has been a developing sector in India for a few years now, with new-age streaming platform Dekkho raising $1.2 million from seven marquee angel investors at the end of 2016. The huge investment showed that there was a space in the market that the right streaming platform could certainly fill.
Now that the market is ready, almost every major streaming-based entertainment service is looking to get in on the action in India, while ready-set Indian companies are also utilizing the technology to make the most of India’s willingness to adopt streaming.
Movie and show streamers looking to muscle in
India has a long-established love of films, with the huge English-speaking population allowing brands like Amazon Prime and Netflix to see an opportunity to open their ready-set streaming services in the country with relatively little additional costs to create region-specific content.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has already visited India, stating that streaming services are doing the best in India, with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney all trying to get in on the video-on-demand market that’s approaching $5 billion in value. Bezos has also pledged to invest even more money into the country.
Netflix has been monitoring the market very closely, identifying that while there was once very cheap broadband in the nation, mobile data costs have been on the rise – with mobile being India’s favourite access point to the internet and streaming services. As such, Netflix has cut its subscription costs by up to 50 percent for customers who sign-up to three or more months.
Streaming consumption has exploded since the launch of the Reliance Jio network in 2016, which offered cheap data to millions of people. Now, not only does India boast the world’s highest data usage per smartphone, but the rate of consumption is set to nearly double over the next four years. Knowing this, Netflix announced 24 films and 16 original series specifically for the Indian market.
Streaming rising hand-in-hand with gaming
Game streaming has been a hot topic around major gaming jurisdictions around the world over the year as Google claimed that it would revolutionize the industry with the revolutionary cross-platform game streaming service Stadia. However, Stadia has been a tremendous flop, lacking in integral features, such as compatible devices at high-resolution streaming, games, and, as a consequence, players.
Where streaming is thriving in the realms of gaming, however, is in eSports. In India, using streams to watch and follow the breakout Indian gaming stars has become very popular. Red Bull shows that streaming has helped to propel eSports in India. The technology hasn’t just become a way to consume the content; it has also become a new-found hope as a career option, with the likes of AFK Gaming and NODWIN Gaming becoming dedicated eSports providers.
With the ever-increasing adoption of streaming as a method of viewing and showing games, Indian gamers have begun to explore other ways in which streaming can deliver entertainment, leading them to live casino gaming platforms. Websites such as Betway present ways for people to play classic casino games live, in real-time, and with human croupiers thanks to them utilizing the power of live streaming technology
Music streaming is also taking off in a big way
IMAGE SOURCE: Pixabay
Back in April 2019, Delhi-based global telecommunications services company Bharti Airtel Limited decided to take a leap into the music video sector, offering a new music video streaming app, Wynk Tube. The new video streaming segment came in to expand the Wynk Music service, allowing users to stream music videos as well as the audio to popular tracks.
Now, India’s music streaming audience has eclipsed 200 million. As relayed by MusicAlly, there are 200 million unique listeners on music streaming apps, with the audience likely being closer to 250 million if you include overlapping users’ accounts separately. Gaana itself boasted over 150 million active users by the end of 2019.
The massive adoption of smartphones and the willingness to burn through mobile data has made India the prime jurisdiction for streaming to take root and perhaps even reach new heights. Although still quite a young sector, India is already savvy when it comes to streaming, utilizing the tech across all forms of entertainment.
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