Future of Video India
29 April 2021

It’s been a fantastic journey for us as we’ve taken the finest stories from all across the country to India and the world. India has a deep and rich storytelling heritage. We have a robust entertainment industry nation-wide, amazing creative talent to bring great stories to life and discerning consumers who love a dazzling variety of local and global stories. Whether its Mighty Little Bheem enthralling an audience of more than 27 million households around the world, International Emmy winning series Delhi Crime, or our beloved films like Guilty, Ludo and Pagglait, it’s been an extremely exciting journey for Netflix in India. We’ve just begun entertaining our audiences and we are committed to telling the best Indian stories for India and the world. 

We want to be everyone’s service of choice by ensuring we provide best in class stories from India and around the world, superb recommendations on what to watch, a supreme user experience along with the tools to make the right viewing decisions for you and the family. We are deeply committed to India and have invested ₹3,000 crores in original programming over the last two years to build a universe of Indian stories on the service. Our recently announced lineup of 41 titles features more variety and diversity than we have seen before including the biggest films and series to gripping documentaries and reality, and unique comedy formats.

Indian consumers are curious, experimental and love variety. We saw this last year with an increase in the viewing of stories across formats, genres and languages. Our Indian members love entertaining and engaging content anytime, anywhere and in a language of their choice. They appreciate the high quality and diversity of stories available on demand. India has the highest viewing of films on Netflix globally and over the last year, 80% of our members in India chose to watch a film every week. On the Top 10 row in India in 2020, Jamtara: Sabka Number Aayega was the Indian title to feature the longest, while our German series Dark was on the Top 10 row for 95 days and our Spanish series, Money Heist featured on our Top 10 row for 170 days.

The last few months have been action-packed. The Indian Premier League (IPL) for cricket, which is India’s biggest annual sporting event, was a big success. This was the first time IPL was behind a pay-wall for all users, and we received an overwhelming response. Disney+ Hotstar now contributes to about 30% of global Disney+ subscribers. The success of the Disney+ Hotstar model in India also encouraged us to launch it in Indonesia.

Further, when the audience was craving for blockbuster movies given theatres were closed, we delighted them through our Multiplex initiative by releasing big local movies directly on Disney+ Hotstar.  We are also going deeper into non-Hindi markets and have launched several titles in Tamil, which were an instant success. So overall, we are very proud of what team Disney+ Hotstar has managed to accomplish in the last few months.

The next IPL is on top of our minds right now. As always, we hope to delight our subscribers with an engaging and interactive viewing experience. We also have an aggressive content slate in English, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu, which should grow our users’ engagement on the platform. All of this helps drive our ambitious subscription agenda – by 2024, we hope to contribute 30-40% of Disney+’s subscriber base of 230-260M.

Disney+ was launched in India through a unique construct. We combined the magic of Disney’s storytelling with the existing scale and content proposition of Hotstar. The product has also been designed for a market such as India – lean on the wire, robust to scale, and mobile-first. So we want to continue growing Disney+ Hotstar in India, giving our consumers access to Disney’s content along with local content and live sports.

Our approach will remain to keep the customer first and choose the construct that best suits our customers. Given the diversity of customer expectations in this part of the world, we will choose whichever service suits a particular market the best. 

India is widely considered the world’s fastest-growing video streaming market. Industry commentators say that it will grow at 25-30% annually for the next 4-5 years* [Source: PWC]. Not only is this very exciting for streaming players and consumers, but it will also grow an entire ecosystem of creators, entrepreneurs, artists, technicians, and all those getting employed directly or indirectly. Hence, it is critical, both for the industry and the country, that the regulatory environment facilitates this growth. We obviously respect the regulator’s role in protecting the industry and its consumers, but at the same time, we hope the OTT industry does not lose focus on growth and value creation.

The scope of growth for the media & entertainment industry in India is massive. The size of the industry is around 1% of India’s GDP, whereas, for countries such as the US, UK, Germany, Japan, etc., the size is 3-4% of the GDP** [Source: BCG-CII Report]. A key driver of this growth would be video streaming and it needs a supportive regulatory environment to contribute to this growth.