The OTT Boom: Creating Content For 'Untapped Audience' MX Media believes in democratizing entertainment for users with a strong focus on being an 'everytainment app'

The Indian over-the-top (OTT) video streaming market may record a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 20 per cent to touch $13 billion–$15 billion over the next decade.

The secret to having a successful reach in the OTT platform is about knowing its audience. One of the growing OTT platforms, MX Player, has tapped this market. "Our distribution and reach is one of our biggest advantages and we consciously took a call that we will go with our massive untapped audience. For us, OTT 2.0 is about replacing television," said Karan Bedi, CEO, MX Media.

MX Media's OTT platform, MX Player, has successfully scaled to over one billion downloads and 300 MAUs globally. The platform believes in democratizing entertainment for users with a strong focus on being an "Everytainment app".

It believes that there is an opportunity to add on newer monetisation models as it continues to expand the user base. "We have seen phenomenal growth in MX Games, wherein on an average, MX users spend 56 minutes per day gaming on the platform., We will also continue to amplify different ad opportunities to help our platform monetize games for MX Media as well as our partner studios."

Talking about being an Unicorn, he said, "MX Player is an Unicorn and the journey has been wonderful. Our proposition since the launch has been to offer the mass Indian market, content that is not available anywhere else but has huge demand. Our 'Original Series' strategy has seen this play out well. We built another platform, MX TakaTak, into a massive Unicorn in a very short span of 15-17 months and then decided to take the route of merging it with Moj as we saw that it's the best value for our shareholders."

The platform has focused on innovation in all spheres including technology, content and marketing strategies. On the technology front, it focuses on improving video compression, user interaction metrics, personalization and recommendation systems and building everything in-house. "Our priority remains content and technology. With regards to content, we had decided on taking the route of creating mass content for our huge and diverse user base."

Talking about the Indian OTT market, he said, "I think it's good to say that it's a very different market here than most Western markets. While OTT in most western markets was just simply a distribution medium where they had the same kind of content which is multi-season, with X number of episodes per season available on TV, cable and premium cable. With this stratification of the channels in the US, you had premium cable, cable, network and local channels and one had the opportunity to have lots of different kinds of content available on them. In India, there was none of that because of distribution constraints amongst other factors. There was basically only one kind of cable and satellite channel and the difference perhaps was only in free and pay content. I think OTT had a huge impact on the Indian content market because, finally, there was an ability for different kinds of content not just daily soaps to be produced for Indian television," said Bedi.