OTT in India – The time is NOW!
Much has been written about how the advent of the internet and the explosion of consumer devices with bigger screens was going to change TV viewing forever. We have speculated, discussed, analysed and lived through topics like cord cutting, binge watching, TV-on-the-go – with one common thread – that of Internet television being an advanced market (read North America, Western Europe, pockets of South East Asia) phenomenon. As for India, it has always been “It’s going to happen – but in the long term”. We were a country of slow and expensive internet, feature phones, and a next to nothing subscription fee for broadcast television. Well, not anymore! OTT is here in India – and it’s happening NOW!
So what’s really changed? For starters, in India, smartphones will be 53.2% of device connections by 2020, and will generate 85% of total mobile data traffic, compared to 69% at the end of 2015 (Source: Cisco VNI). With the impending mass-scale launch of 4G LTE across the country, we are looking at data speeds in the range of 5 Mbps on our handsets, available at an increasingly price-war driven lucrative market. As for content, there is Bollywood which is the single largest producer of movies in the world, together with a rich and highly active regional film industry – from Kollywood to Mollywood to Tollywood.
In the last 3 years, large content houses like Star, Sony, and Eros have launched their own OTT services (Hotstar, Sony LIV, Eros Now). DTH operator Tata Sky has the already popular EverywhereTV, and independent players like YuppTV, NextGTV, etc. claim to have a growing and paying active base today. With the recent addition of Netflix to the mix, and Indian OTT industry has never looked more exciting. But does that mean we have already arrived? Why is it that in a country of 140 million paid TV households, the combined subscriber base of OTT is barely touching 1 million? What does it take to grow this lucrative segment to its full potential? As always, the devil is in the details…
If numbers speak the truth, we have barely scratched the surface of OTT television in India. If we are to cross the proverbial chasm after the early adopters, we need to address what I call the three challenges of growth: security, quality & time-to-Market. Premium content needs to be secure, in order to be monetized. The content needs to play in high quality even when when millions of users hit the play button at the same time, for which service needs to scale – and finally, no OTT provider has the luxury to wait for months in order to launch a new service, or make an update. They need analytics to quickly measure customer insights and respond with changes. TV on Web needs Web Speed & Agility.
Cisco Infinite Video addresses these key challenges by offering a secure, managed and hosted SaaS based solution that uses the power of cloud to scale just-in-time, and deliver a new service from scratch in matter of weeks. Over 70 customers including pay TV operators, content providers and independent OTT services are already using Cisco Infinite Video across the world, enabling viewers to enjoy TV on their own devices and big screen TVs – anywhere and anytime.
Our video technologies are already touching one in every two TV households in India – and we are more bullish than ever about OTT in India. For our country, it’s time to hit “Play” NOW!
Reference Link: Adam Davies: You’ve Got a What?
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