Streaming market in India to be worth $15 billion by 2030

India’s over-the-top (OTT) streaming industry, including video and audio, has the potential to touch $15 billion over the next nine years, said a new report by independent transaction advisory firm RBSA Advisors.

This would include a $12.5 billion size for the video market and $2.5 billion for audio. The size of the OTT market in FY20 stood at an estimated $1.7 billion.

Key drivers of the growth include the fact that India has the second-highest per capita consumption of online video in the world, the cheapest mobile data in the world priced at ₹18.5/GB, the growth in rural internet penetration (estimated to be 24% as of 2018) and the steep rise of smartphone users in India, estimated to be over 760 million in 2021. The average monthly data usage per user in India increased 20% year-on-year to 13.5 GB in December 2020 as Indians spent about five hours daily on a smartphone, as per the Mobile Broadband India Traffic Index (Mbit) 2021.

“Covid-19 has changed the way audiences consume media. An undeniable trend surfaced in this period with the adoption of OTTs. The growing market and consumer appetite for content of choice available on OTT platforms fuelled this spurt. OTTs offer a never before consumer experience–choice of content, ease of access, choice of device or mediums and liberal censorship policy,” Rajeev Shah, managing director and CEO RBSA Advisors said in a statement adding that covid has accelerated the shift in consumer behaviour, advancing a disruption, which would have otherwise taken a minimum of half a decade.

Smartphones with affordable data have also brought the native speaker base of 22 scheduled Indian languages from tier-two, three and four cities online and created a massive opportunity for OTT services increasingly focusing on regional language content. The next wave of growth in the OTT landscape will come from these small towns and the vernacular language-speaking population, the report said.

With access to better networks, digital connectivity and smartphones, OTT platforms in India have increasingly attracted subscribers on a concurrent basis. Apart from foreign services such as Disney+ Hotstar, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, the space is seeing many local and regional OTT players, such as SonyLIV, Voot, ZEE5, Eros Now, ALTBalaji, Hoichoi and Adda Times, among others.

The massive investments made by these OTT services in originals, as well as acquired content, will help subscription video-on-demand make up 93% of the total OTT revenue in India (as compared to 87% globally), increasing at a CAGR of 30.7% between 2019-2024, according to the report. ARPU (average revenue per user) in the OTT video segment in India is projected at $7.2 in 2021 but RBSA expects user penetration to increase from 25.8% this year to 32% by 2025. OTT users are expected to be at 462.7 million over the same period.

As far as the video OTT market goes, it is dominated by Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, both commanding a 20% share, followed by Disney+ Hotstar at 17%, ZEE5 at 9%, and SonyLIV and ALTBalaji at 4% each. The audio market, on the other hand, is led by Gaana (30%), JioSaavn (24%), Wynk Music (15%) and Spotify (15%), the report said. Live Mint