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The Collection Wed, 21 May 25 |
Multiple stories, multiple perspectives, one theme worth your time—every week. |
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If you tune into the upcoming season of Panchayat this July, India’s second-most popular Hindi show in 2024, your experience may be radically different from the past. And this would have little to do with the plot or the characters.
Rather, it would be because Amazon Prime Video has brought a key change to its subscription offerings from mid-June—spraying ads over all the films and TV shows in its stable, even for subscribers on its flagship annual plan. Unsurprisingly, the only way you could escape this would be to shell out more for a new ad-free tier the platform has said it will add.
Amazon is hardly venturing into unexplored territory here—not for OTT platforms, not for the numerous other consumer apps Indians use. There’s even a special term for it: enshittification. “The gradual decline in the quality and user experience of online platforms as they prioritise profits over user satisfaction.”
We’ve previously written about the shallow depths of India’s consumer market, and why that, in turn, leads companies to extract more from the same cohort of users at the upper echelons of the pyramid. In Two by Two, my colleagues Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan explored this from multiple angles—when online platforms started decaying, and how a user’s experience could differ based on whether the platform was privately or publicly owned.
Two By Two • 36 |
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But that’s from the consumer perspective. For Amazon, this is about solving advertisements at a time when rival content companies are breathing down its neck. And broader anxieties about the fate of pure-play subscription businesses—all of which we explore through the pieces in this edition of The Collection.
Amazon has a long history of attempting to prime viewers with advertisements. In 2022, we wrote about the convoluted logic behind miniTV—a free, ad-supported streaming vertical. The following year, we covered its Prime Lite bet, a lower-tier version of Prime Video which also included ad-supported streaming. Then, it bought MX Player in 2024 and eventually merged miniTV into it.
All with the hope of cracking commerce advertising—in many ways, the holy grail of ads.
Praveen wrote about Amazon’s strategic moves to break into this space last year.
Essentially, Instagram proved that if you want to create commerce advertising, you need to begin as a ‘content’ app.
[…]
In some ways, Amazon is coming at it from the other direction. Instagram started off as a content app that integrated commerce into it. Amazon is a commerce app that’s integrating content. I see no reason why one approach is better than the other, but the one thing that Amazon needs to make it work isn’t products—it’s addictive content, something that Instagram has in spades.
And I believe that’s where MX Player comes in.
I’d urge you to read his piece to understand what Amazon’s MX Player gamble was all about, and what that says about the firm’s overall advertising strategy.
What does Amazon know about buying that the rest of us don’t?
It’s elusive. It almost never works. And yet, Amazon seems to have a plan
Netflix, for its part, has tried to find success by climbing down the ladder—working around the limits of India’s market by creating a “worse” version of itself and offering it for a lower price, whilst maintaining its premium brand.
Netflix climbs down India’s ladder
With a little bit of help from Jio, Netflix takes a unique position to avoid the same fate as Disney+Hotstar
Now, with the Reliance-Disney merger of Viacom18 and Star India, India’s most powerful OTT platform and Amazon’s newest competitor is Jiohotstar.
And the platform is already foraying into new territory that challenges some very big rivals: bite-sized videos.
Inside Jiohotstar’s plan to make Youtube sweat
The 800-pound gorilla of Indian streaming wants to go where its rivals fear to tread
Which brings us to the biggest elephant in the home theatre—Youtube.
In that rapidly blurring ground between the OG “OTT apps” like Netflix, Prime Video, and Jiohotstar and user-content dominated Youtube is a fight for “new television” itself.
Two By Two • 32 |
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For now, making subscriptions work in a sustainable way remains among the hardest business problems in India. But new ventures that have arguably shown the most promise are going about it very differently from the incumbents.
Like Stage, a regional OTT app which creates and curates premium, original programming at highly affordable prices for Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, and Rajasthani audiences. And whose strategy for making it big is to capture India’s teeming regional content markets by telling stories rooted in local cultures.
Two By Two • 39 |
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That’s a wrap for this week. But would you pay for Amazon’s new ad-free plan? Leave a comment on our on-site edition or write to me at [email protected] and let me know.
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Rahul leads the promotion and distribution efforts for the journalism produced by The Ken. He works at the intersection of the publication's editorial and business operations.
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