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The Future of Video in India is
Bright, as Video Becomes Increasingly Democratized and
Consumers Have It All
4 MAY 2022
The Asia Video Industry Association
held its third Future of Video India virtual conference
to much optimism as industry leaders remained bullish on
India’s long-term view, after its fifth straight quarter
of economic expansion, with all round economic recovery
and an economic rebound that is much broader based and
across multiple sectors.
Mihir Shah, Vice President, India,
Media Partners Asia, opened the conference with an
outlook on India’s video market, which showed a sharp
rebound in the TV advertising market, after a depressed
2020. The market grew 37% last year and stood at U$S3.8
billion now. While the broader Pay TV industry continued
to see a lot of pressure, Free to Air revenues have
surged, and the pandemic has resulted in the rapid
adoption and consumption of Connected TV especially in
the urban centres. With a Total Video Market worth US$12
billion and growing at 9% CAGR in the next 5 years to
US$20 billion, the AVOD market was also predicted to
remain buoyant and triple in the next five years, with
SVOD tripling as well.
This optimism for the market
continued with the keynote conversation with Sunil
Rayan, Head, Disney+ Hotstar India. With the mission to
making the streamer as accessible to as many people as
possible, Disney+ Hotstar India had made a significant
shift to an SVOD offering while maintaining their
freemium ad-supported model, which continued to be much
larger than SVOD. “We’ve had significant growth in the
SVOD side. But India is a highly price sensitive market
. . . and AVOD gives scale . . . so we are always trying
to balance the two,” said Rayan. Their content offering
had also evolved into ‘cricket plus entertainment’, with
a shift both in investment and quality of entertainment
that is digitally native. Rayan was also of the view
that the streaming market was highly vibrant, and there
was certainly room for multiple operators.
However, as the ecosystem
developed, the content needed to be targeted at specific
audiences, and while consolidation was already
happening, it will continue to evolve.
Megha Tata, Managing Director,
South Asia, Warner Bros. Discovery, was also positive on
the outlook for both linear TV and OTT. “There are
multiple scenarios which are evolving in the country . .
. each India needs to be catered to in a different way,”
said Tata. This was also not just about pricing and
product but also content. “It’s not an ‘either or’
market yet, but an ‘and’ market, both can survive and
will survive,” added Tata. But how the share of wallet
would play out continued to be an evolution every day.
Gourav Rakshit, COO, Viacom18 Digital Ventures, added
that the holy grail wasto create habit in your
consumers.
“Real estate on the phone is small,
real estate in the mind is even smaller,” said Rakshit.
Sharing her views on the road ahead, Tata also pointed
out that revenue and monetization today wasstill coming
from linear,
and funding all the investment that was needed in
digital. “We need to take care of the now or there is no
future,” said Tata.
The future was certainly going to
be made brighter with the advent of 5G, as the session’s
panellists spoke about the challenges that 5G alleviated
and the opportunities it presented. Manoj Gurnani, CTO &
Head of Strategy, India, Nokia, shared that a new
generation of technology was going to bring more
capabilities and more efficiencies. With 5G bringing on
fixed wireless capabilities, it was going to be a great
enabler, which would lead to the enhancement of the
quality of experience. Mahendra Nath Vyas, Executive
Director, Planetcast Media Services, also added that
while AR/VR and gaming were the future technology that
would ride on the 5G networks, there was also a huge
opportunity to unlock content creation in remote areas
with 5G.
However, content creation in itself
had also evolved with OTT. Nimisha Pandey, Chief Content
Officer, Hindi Originals, ZEE5, shared that OTT had
enabled the content creators and the entire ecosystem to
create content for small taste clusters, with the
decision making no longer based on the mass audience.
The biggest challenge faced by
content creators now was the need to evolve at the pace
that the audience was evolving, as audiences were
evolving too fast and keeping in synch with the pace was
the biggest challenge. Ultimately, Pandey also believed
that it all began with a great story, and it was
important to
give value to both passion and craft.
Avinash Kaul, CEO, Network18,
Managing Director, A+E Networks TV18, summed up the
optimism for the industry in his closing keynote. With
video now having been democratized, consumers have never
had it better. And with the online video ecosystem
having opened up, funding and content had also poured
in, with money coming into the ecosystem from all
sources. With a greater investment in technology and
data, content was also getting shaped because of
analytics and there was also a new future for data
driven companies to tap into funding. All of this would
have led to better content all round, and even tailored
content for cohorts of audiences. From a consumer’s
point of view, it was now utopian. “The future of video
has always been bright and will continue to shine
brighter and brighter,” said Kaul.
The Future of Video India is
generously supported by Bharucha & Partners, Brightcove,
Google Cloud, Netflix, Synamedia and Xandr.
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