Its going to be fun, literally so, for the millions of online shoppers in India with Walmart’s Flipkart proposing a free video streaming service for its customers that will rival Amazon’s Prime Video. Amazon charges an annual fee of Rs 999. The free service could offer competition to Amazon. The only difference is that Amazon gives some additional benefits to the Amazon Prime customers like free deliveries on the products they order and, in most cases, next day delivery.
In Flipkart’s model of customer loyalty programme, Flipkart Plus, not all products are included for free delivery. The concept of next day delivery on Flipkart is also not so common. There’s no denying the fact that Amazon gained a lot of customers through its Amazon Prime offer.
The expectation is that Walmart might want to take advantage of the coming festive season in India by launching the free video streaming service starting September. A beta version of this service is being tried out according to reports, though the company has kept it under wraps for the time being.
The news from this source also indicates that Flipkart may not get involved in commissioning its own original programmes but outsource content. These could be from US sources like Walt Disney Co and locally, from Balaji Telefilms etc.
The report indicates that Flipkart may have a loyalty programme where every customer who spends Rs 100 gets 2 ‘super coins’ and 300 such coins earns a free subscription to the Flipkart Plus programme. The ‘super coins’ can also be used for many other benefits as well, like booking flight tickets and for other purposes.
As mentioned earlier, this announcement or report on Walmart-Flipkart’s move for a free video streaming service will make the competition between the two US giants, Amazon and Walmart, in the Indian online marketplace quite interesting to watch. Both companies have invested heavily in India which is the second largest market. With 500 million people connected to the internet in India and this number likely to reach over 800 million in the foreseeable future, it is a mouthwatering prospect for any customer-facing business.
More interestingly, Boston Consulting Group has predicted that the video streaming market which is valued at $500 million could grow to over $5 billion or ten times, by 2023.