Sushant Sreeram, country director of Prime Video India, has reiterated the streamer’s intention of doubling down on investments in the territory.
“Our five-year plan in India for Prime Video is to double what we have done in the last seven years. And our investment thesis is actually an apt reflection of that. We have committed to doubling our investment over the next five years compared to what we have invested in the previous five. We said this recently and we continue to stick to it,” Sreeram told PvNew. “The question that I and the entire team in India is asked is, ‘Can we do this twice as bigger? Can we deliver, twice as much for customers across shows movies and the whole works? That’s the simple summary of what the five-year plan is.”
Earlier this year, Prime Video signed a deal with the Indian government to boost the country’s creative economy. Following on from that, the streamer has teamed with the government’s office of the principal scientific adviser on “Mission Start Ab,” a seven-episode series where 10 entrepreneurs with made-for-India innovations with the potential to impact socio- economic change undertake a series of challenges in pursuit of scaling their business and securing funding.
“Whether it’s ‘Dragon’s Den’ or some of the others, they don’t delve as much into all the various aspects of scaling a startup. Keep in mind, these are not business plans, these are fully operational businesses that are looking to find support, mentoring and advice and funding to get to the next orbit. It’s not a zero to one journey, but it’s actually the one to 100 journey,” Sreeram said about “Mission Start Ab.”
The streamer’s deep growth strategy continues apace across five vectors, beginning with language. Sreeram reveals that some 60% of Prime Video subscribers consume content in four or more languages. The service programs in 10 Indian languages. In the programming vector the focus is on diversity of genres. Sreeram points to the diversity in the 2023 programming that includes family entertainer “Happy Family, Conditions Apply,” crime caper “Farzi,” golden age of Indian cinema drama “Jubilee,” true crime documentary “Dancing on the Grave,” thriller “Suzhal: The Vortex” and friendships and love saga “Jee Karda.”
The next seasons of hit series “Mirzapur,” “Made in Heaven,” “Paatal Lok” and “The Family Man” are also due on the service. “Our view is definitively no longer narrow towards a specific genre or set of genres – we continue to test out very, very different formats of programming,” Sreeram said. “We have realized that truly authentic storytelling by authentic storytellers – they don’t need to be accomplished storytellers – actually does work consistently well and across languages.”
Prime Video India’s third growth vector is accessibility. “It’s one thing to have great shows and movies or service, it’s quite another to have them across 10 languages, it’s about making sure that our product is accessible across price points, across the socio-economic hierarchy of the country, across different parts of the country, right across their devices of choice,” Sreeram said. The service has partnered with telcos and multichannel video programming distributors while also building its own product suite that includes Prime Video Mobile Edition. There are several other initiatives designed to make access “friction free,” Sreeram said.
The fourth growth vector is the bolting on of additional programming via Prime Video Channels, which launched in India in 2021 with eight channels and now boasts 18, providing a further 26,000 hours of content per year. The final vector is the recent launch of the movie rental service, which doesn’t require a membership, that has 5,000 titles available. Customers across 95% of India’s post codes are renting from the service, Sreeram said.
Cricket is a huge driver in India’s streaming wars as evidenced by the $6 billion payout by Viacom18 and Disney for rights to the Indian Premier League. Prime Video tasted some success recently with the India-New Zealand cricket series.
“Live sports form an important part of what constitutes entertainment, so, if we really want to be India’s foremost entertainment destination, it is reasonable to presume that we will need to make sure that we have the full bouquet, or as much of the full bouquet, to offer customers. We continue to evaluate options,” Sreeram said.
While Sreeram declined to provide subscriber numbers (a recent Ampere Analysis study pegs it at 12.4 million), he says that India has among the “highest adoption rates of Prime Video anywhere in the world” and that “there has been no let up in that momentum at all.”
