Here’s a fact: the Indian video streaming market is consolidating. In February, Walt Disney and Reliance Industries announced a joint venture to combine two of India’s largest streaming platforms – Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema. This combined entity will capture a whopping 85% of India’s video-streaming market.
Amazon’s Prime Video (subscription-based) and miniTV (ad-supported) are other prominent players in the Indian video-streaming market, and recently, Amazon announced that it will acquire MX Player for INR 500 crores.
Now, if you asked anyone who owned an Android device about a decade ago, “Hey, what app do you use to stream video locally?” just about everyone would say MX Player. It was a really simple app that supported many types of files, even on the most affordable phones at that time.
MX Player was developed by a Korean company, J2 Interactive, in 2011 for local video playback. It gained popularity, and by 2018, it had 500 million downloads. This is when Times Internet, the digital arm of The Times Group, acquired it for about INR 1,000 crores in an attempt to enter the video streaming market in India after its failed attempt with BoxTV in 2016.
The Times Group hosted licensed shows from Alt Balaji, The Viral Fever, and SonyLIV, and even launched MX Takatak in 2019 as an alternative to TikTok, which gained huge popularity among the Indian masses.
However, things didn’t exactly go as planned. Jio disrupted the telecom market, making even the remotest regions in India connected to the internet with dirt cheap prices (practically free). This meant nobody was downloading content to watch it locally, and with giants like Netflix launching affordable subscriptions, Times Group’s plans were shot to hell.
So, naturally, when Amazon reached out to The Times Group at the beginning of 2023, they were eager to seal the deal, but Amazon kind of went, “meh!” and dropped the deal around mid-2023.
This brings us to the present when, after the Walt Disney-Reliance partnership, Amazon’s interest in MX Player rekindled, and they agreed to buy it from The Times Group for a mere INR 500 crores, half of what The Times Group had paid to acquire it in 2018.
But……why?
As it turns out, MX Player’s penetration in tier 2 and 3 cities is huge, and Amazon’s interest in buying MX Player is because they want to tap this group of people.
You see, they already have an ad-supported video-streaming service – miniTV – and having access to the user base of MX Player would mean they could extend the services of miniTV to 200 million users overnight. Any sane person would say that’s a bargain, especially considering the battle that lies ahead for Amazon with Walt Disney-Reliance and other streaming services in India.
The current landscape of the Indian video-streaming market is very tight, with Disney+ Hotstar leading the pack, followed by Amazon Prime, SonyLIV, Zee5, and Netflix. It all comes down to who can provide the best content at the cheapest possible prices.
How Amazon leverages MX Player’s strengths will be very interesting, and what the video-streaming market will look like post Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema merger makes the landscape daunting.
Until then, keep learning and growing!
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