100 million paying subscribers reached on Hotstar, Eros and Prime Video platforms in India

In 2022 India entered the very select club of countries generating more than USD 4 billion a year across SVOD and AVOD, ranking 6th globally and 3rd in Asia-Pacific, behind China and Japan. With the consolidation of its market research offer in the country, especially towards AVOD, streaming devices, and OTT partnerships, it was time for Dataxis to take stock of one of the most dynamic, challenging, and strategic markets for the OTT industry. 2022 was the confirmation of what had been witnessed since 2020: SVOD is skyrocketing in the country. The top 3 players, Disney+ Hotstar, Eros Now, and Amazon Prime Video gathered 25 million additional subscribers in one year. Hotstar even temporarily crossed the 50 million landmark during the third quarter of the year. These figures are the results of two things: aggressive promotion strategies, initiated at the end of 2020, and the multiplication of distribution partnerships with aggregators and operators, especially toward mobile. The Indian exception: an early craze for AVOD Historically, India used to be against the flow regarding OTT. While SVOD was flourishing across the rest of the globe during the last decade, Indian OTT platforms were at the vanguard of AVOD. With high churn figures across subscription services, consumption habits revolving around mobile, and a strong appetite for free user-generated content platforms, Indians shunned premium SVOD platforms and instead favoured the vast catalogues provided for free by historical players such as SonyLIV, MX Player, Hungama Play, or Hotstar. Hence, in 2015, an AVOD platform like Hungama Play was gathering significantly more monthly active users than the total number of subscribers across all the SVOD platforms available in the country at that time. But over the last three years, the market dynamic has changed in favour of SVOD offers, whether coming from content providers, betting on more premium offers, or from historical AVOD actors, trying to diversify their revenue streams and secure more consistent cash flows. The surge of SVOD, followed by the diversification of business models This growing shift from AVOD to SVOD follows the hybridization wave of OTT services that has been witnessed in the US and Western Europe in the past three years. In India, while a growing number of AVOD platforms have started to stack SVOD tiers on top of their free window, such as MX Player, Oho Gujarati, Aha Video, Stage, or Heeroz in recent years, the most noticeable fact is the launch of multiple SVOD-only platforms, with no free window at all, such as PTC Play, Cineprime, or Primeflix. In fact, while AVOD-only platforms accounted for almost half of the Indian competitive landscape in 2018, with SVOD-only accounting for 25% of the platforms at that time, AVOD platforms now...