Amazon India appears to have stirred a hornet’s nest with its Amazon Prime Video offering, even after it doubled the fee to Rs 999 per year. Thanks to the success that Amazon has seen, Paytm Mall, Future Bazaar and Flipkart are looking to follow suit. According to a Business Standard report, these three players are gearing up to make their sites offer something similar to their customers and have started earmarking funds for this foray.
According to information available, Paytm has set aside $30 million to be invested on procuring content. It already has an ‘inbox’ feature through which it offers its customers links to live TV, games and entertainment and these would now be expanded to make them regular content accessible to all customers.
The funds being shored up by the Future Group is said to be as high as $14.5 billion and the company will build a separate vertical in the entertainment sector and make it accessible on all the apps they have. These funds will be deployed more towards technology upgradation in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning on its platform. Going ahead they will integrate other services like movie tickets online.
The third and possibly the most potent rival for Amazon, Flipkart would also be keen to get on the entertainment bandwagon on its ecommerce platform, but then the company is right now in a transition and a takeover mode and till Walmart takes complete control and approves all major policy decisions, the activities on the ground may not roll out. The funds Flipkart plans to invest on this business is expected to be $50 million.
But all these companies see the logic in adding entertainment to their businesses. The explanation is that their customers don’t indulge in shopping every day or even every other day. But they look for entertainment each evening and night and over the weekends. And when they do log into the site so frequently, they may end up shopping more. It may not be very different from the way the brick and mortar malls are designed and function. And the content providers and the fare they offer can be a source of advertisement revenue as well.