According to the Indian Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur, India’s over-the-top (OTT) business is expected to grow at 21% per year until 2024, when it will be worth nearly 2 billion USD.
“We are ready to take another jump as 300 million people are poised to connect online as India marches to solidify its presence in the media and entertainment sector,” Thakur said on Thursday at the ‘India Forum’ in Cannes.
He said that artificial intelligence, Virtual Reality, and immersive technologies like metaverse give enormous opportunities for India’s IT workforce.
Thakur further asserted that startups from the media and entertainment industry would display their technical prowess and pitch to the best from global AVGC, animation, visual effects, gaming, and comics space.
The GOI Boosting the Indian Media and Entertainment Ecosystem
Over the past eight years, the center has envisioned initiatives to boost co-productions, film shoots, and film facilitation in India. Thakur further added that states like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have devised their own film facilitation policies and offered production opportunities.
According to Thakur, these initiatives aim to increase India’s media and entertainment sector, estimated to reach $53 billion per year by 2025.
“The Indian government recognized audiovisual services as one of 12 ‘champion service sectors,’ and established an AVGC task force comprised of industry leaders to draw a policy roadmap for India to achieve a quantum leap in this area,” he stated.
While presenting the Union Budget 2022 for the fiscal years 2022 and 2023, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the formation of an AVGC task force in collaboration with the AICTE to recommend strategies to upskill and employ the young generation in the animation industry.
Meanwhile, both the central and state governments in the country are supporting the OTT space.
The Indian OTT Space
Kerala’s government recently stated that on 1st November, it would launch CSpace, a state-owned OTT platform. Movies, short films, and documentaries will be accessible on the platform.
On behalf of the Kerala state government, Kerala State Film Development Corporation, India’s first public sector film development corporation, has launched CSpace.
The sector is also growing because movies are released directly on the OTT platforms. Many Bollywood entertainers, including Shah Rukh Khan, Shreyas Talpade, and Anushka Sharma, have declared plans to launch their own OTT platforms. Aditya Chopra, a film director, and producer, also intends to launch his own OTT company, YRF Entertainment. He plans to invest 500 crore INR in this business.
Meanwhile, ALTBalaji, the OTT initiative of producer Ekta Kapoor, has been in operation since 2017.
Deloitte’s TMT Predictions 2022 estimates that the Indian OTT video streaming market could witness a more than 20% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next decade, reaching 13 billion USD to 15 billion USD.
The report also expects paid subscribers in India to increase at a 17% CAGR from 102 million in 2016 to over 224 million by 2026.
The dominant players in the Indian OTT market include Jio TV, Disney+ Hotstar, ALTBalaji, MX Player, Amazon Prime Video, Zee5, SonyLiv, and Netflix.
A report by Statista suggests that the Disney+ Hotstar is the leading OTT player in the country with 29% market share, followed by Jio TV with 23%, and Amazon Prime Video in the third position.
