India among top countries for viewership on NBC-owned hayu OTT app
The newly launched reality TV SVOD app home to shows such as 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians' plans to subtitle some of its content into Hindi as well.
- Dec 17, 2021,
- Updated Dec 17, 2021 5:17 PM IST
Indian subscribers are watching a lot of content on newly launched hayu video OTT player, taking the country to one of the top slots among the 29 countries it operates in, according to Hendrik McDermott, Managing Director (Direct to Consumer - Global) at American television network NBCUniversal, which owns the streaming platform.
"We normally measure average viewing per user per month and generally it is between 12 and 15 hours per user per month on our platform. We're over indexing strongly for that at the moment with our Indian subscriptions. While it's a bit early for that to be a metric that we can hang our hats on because we have been live only for a few days now, the early signs are very encouraging," he told Business Today.
The app, which launched a fortnight ago, is the latest entrant to India's already buzzing OTT space which has more than 40 significant national, international and regional players vying for the $2.9 billion market (as estimated by PwC for 2024) market.
Other US giants Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney (in collaboration with Hotstar as Disney+ Hotstar) are already battling it out for eyeballs and wallet space in India. Netflix recently slashed subscription prices by 25 per cent across its four India plans in a bid to amass more subscribers. Another American TV network HBO is also reported to be debuting its HBO Max OTT in India soon.
India, with its 1.3 billion-strong population with only 353 million OTT users in the country users so far, according to a report by Ormax Media, offers a huge potential for these players, especially as smartphones penetrate deeper into the smaller towns and villages, and other developed markets get penetrated.
hayu is pegging itself as the only reality content SVOD (ad-free and subscription based) service in India. With shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians, The Real Housewives and Below Deck, its target audience in India is the 18-34-year-old women with access to high-speed internet who will pay for a subscription. "Our research indicates that over 3/4 of our addressable base in India would consider using a service that has US reality TV content on it, so that indicates quite a large opportunity for us…We're working on a project to start subtitling some of the content into Hindi. That will be the first time, at least for our platform, that we will have local language programming on the platform, too. Again, that helps for us to widen the addressable audience," said McDermott.
The platform has priced its plans at Rs 349 for three months and Rs 999 for an annual subscription. In India, a price sensitive market, the annual rates currently are Netflix Rs 2,388-7,788, Amazon Prime Video Rs 1,499, Disney+ Hotstar Rs 1,499, SonyLiv Rs 999 and Zee5 Rs 499.
"We've already seen a very strong uptake of subscription in just under two weeks since launch… We're really pleased so far and we're on track from a business plan perspective," said Hendrik about hayu, which relies on its parent NBCUniversal's 2000 hours of annual unscripted content.
Also Read: Netflix cuts prices in India; check out new rates
Also Read: Netflix vs Amazon Prime vs Disney+ Hotstar: Prices in India compared
Indian subscribers are watching a lot of content on newly launched hayu video OTT player, taking the country to one of the top slots among the 29 countries it operates in, according to Hendrik McDermott, Managing Director (Direct to Consumer - Global) at American television network NBCUniversal, which owns the streaming platform.
"We normally measure average viewing per user per month and generally it is between 12 and 15 hours per user per month on our platform. We're over indexing strongly for that at the moment with our Indian subscriptions. While it's a bit early for that to be a metric that we can hang our hats on because we have been live only for a few days now, the early signs are very encouraging," he told Business Today.
The app, which launched a fortnight ago, is the latest entrant to India's already buzzing OTT space which has more than 40 significant national, international and regional players vying for the $2.9 billion market (as estimated by PwC for 2024) market.
Other US giants Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney (in collaboration with Hotstar as Disney+ Hotstar) are already battling it out for eyeballs and wallet space in India. Netflix recently slashed subscription prices by 25 per cent across its four India plans in a bid to amass more subscribers. Another American TV network HBO is also reported to be debuting its HBO Max OTT in India soon.
India, with its 1.3 billion-strong population with only 353 million OTT users in the country users so far, according to a report by Ormax Media, offers a huge potential for these players, especially as smartphones penetrate deeper into the smaller towns and villages, and other developed markets get penetrated.
hayu is pegging itself as the only reality content SVOD (ad-free and subscription based) service in India. With shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians, The Real Housewives and Below Deck, its target audience in India is the 18-34-year-old women with access to high-speed internet who will pay for a subscription. "Our research indicates that over 3/4 of our addressable base in India would consider using a service that has US reality TV content on it, so that indicates quite a large opportunity for us…We're working on a project to start subtitling some of the content into Hindi. That will be the first time, at least for our platform, that we will have local language programming on the platform, too. Again, that helps for us to widen the addressable audience," said McDermott.
The platform has priced its plans at Rs 349 for three months and Rs 999 for an annual subscription. In India, a price sensitive market, the annual rates currently are Netflix Rs 2,388-7,788, Amazon Prime Video Rs 1,499, Disney+ Hotstar Rs 1,499, SonyLiv Rs 999 and Zee5 Rs 499.
"We've already seen a very strong uptake of subscription in just under two weeks since launch… We're really pleased so far and we're on track from a business plan perspective," said Hendrik about hayu, which relies on its parent NBCUniversal's 2000 hours of annual unscripted content.
Also Read: Netflix cuts prices in India; check out new rates
Also Read: Netflix vs Amazon Prime vs Disney+ Hotstar: Prices in India compared