The video streaming segment in India is seeing more players joining in each day. And with this original content also growing. Amazon Prime and Netflix have been developing original content in India, be it movies or series.
According to a PTI report, the latest one to enter the arena now is YouTube. And it could be starting its service with hosting a show by Oscar winning music director AR Rahman titled ‘ARRived’. The service will be named ‘Originals’ and will be part of the YouTube platform. There will be ads running on this service; however, one hopes there will be a subscription service like the other two named above. YouTube does have such a paid model in some markets but there is no clarity on when it would be introduced in India.
YouTube claims it has found that the average data consumption per user in India has grown to about 8GB per month thanks largely to the lowering costs of data and most of it is consumed by streaming videos.
YouTube enjoys a user base of 245 million each month and this figure is only growing quite rapidly.
Even as YouTube is getting ready do battle the two major rivals, Netflix and Amazon are making huge investments in getting local contents created through the best in the business. Netflix has Sacred Games and Ghoul and Amazon has Inside Edge Breathe.
And there are many players in the business in India with their own strengths, like Hotstar, HOOQ, Voot, Eros Now, Yupp TV, Hungama and ALT Balaji.
For most of them, Bollywood will remain the largest fare but it cannot be denied that ‘original’ content also enjoy a considerable patronage. For YouTube it is only a matter of expanding its existing service where people have uploaded their videos and these need to be curated and presented to the subscribers. In terms of numbers, YouTube has 60 odd videos already in its library under the ‘Originals category and this is across all countries and another 50 may join these in 2019.
Google is also looking at the online video ad-spends revenue stream gaining it more income. The company feels the new stream will be great benefit to the advertisers as well.