'We will do okay': Amazon Prime Video on recent subscription price hike in India

Amazon Prime Video is confident that their recent hike in prices of membership plans in a price-sensitive Indian market will reap benefits as the video streaming service caters to a broad span of customers, according to its top executive Sushant Sreeram. 

Within two years of hiking its Prime membership prices in India, the firm recently increased the pricing of its monthly and quarterly plans by Rs 120 and Rs 140, respectively. 

“We are obsessed over customers. It's not just our belief but we've seen it play out that as long as we are making it (the service) broadly available and accessible for customers across different products, price plans and genres of entertainment, we will do okay,” Sreeram, Country Director, Prime Video, India, told Business Today on the sidelines of FICCI FRAMES 2023 in Mumbai on Thursday. 

This comes when rival global streaming giant Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos has called India a big prize where it is important for the global streaming giant to get pricing and payments methods right, noting that a price reduction in December 2021 increased its user engagement by 30 per cent and revenue growth of 24 per cent in 2022 compared to the year prior.  

Prime Video recently informed its customers that its monthly plan will be priced at Rs 299 instead of Rs 179 earlier, and the quarterly plan is priced at Rs 599 compared to Rs 459 earlier. The annual Prime Membership and the annual Prime Lite Membership prices remain the same at Rs 1,499 and Rs 999, respectively. But Amazon Prime membership includes other services such as shopping benefits, free delivery, access to Prime Music, Prime Reading, Prime Gaming, Audible, and Kindle Unlimited, apart from the video streaming content.  

Sreeram, who was promoted as Country Director of the streaming service in India in April 2023, added: “That cornerstone of customer obsession, which is true not only for Prime Video but more broadly for Amazon as well has held us in good stead. I feel pretty confident about it.”

Delivering a keynote address on ‘OTT: Powering India’s Storytelling and Creative Ecosystem’ at the FICCI Frames 2023 business of entertainment convention, he iterated that entertainment is becoming borderless because of streaming services. “Today, over 60 per cent of the customers on Prime Video stream content in 4 or more languages while 50 per cent viewership of local language content comes from outside the home states.” He added that 25 per cent audience of Indian titles on Prime Video comes from outside India.