The Future of Video in India is Bright

New Delhi, India, May 4, 2022--The Asia Video Industry Association held its third Future of Video India virtual conference to much optimism as industry leaders remained bullish on India’s long-term view, after its fifth straight quarter of economic expansion, with all round economic recovery and an economic rebound that is much broader based and across multiple sectors.

Mihir Shah, Vice President, India, Media Partners Asia, opened the conference with an outlook on India’s video market, which showed a sharp rebound in the TV advertising market, after a depressed 2020.

This optimism for the market continued with the keynote conversation with Sunil Rayan, Head, Disney+ Hotstar India. With the mission to making the streamer as accessible to as many people as possible, Disney+ Hotstar India had made a significant shift to an SVOD offering while maintaining their freemium ad-supported model, which continued to be much larger than SVOD. “We’ve had significant growth in the SVOD side. But India is a highly price sensitive market . . . and AVOD gives scale . . . so we are always trying to balance the two,” said Rayan.

The future was certainly going to be made brighter with the advent of 5G, as the session’s panellists spoke about the challenges that 5G alleviated and the opportunities it presented. Manoj Gurnani, CTO & Head of Strategy, India, Nokia, shared that a new generation of technology was going to bring more capabilities and more efficiencies. With 5G bringing on fixed wireless capabilities, it was going to be a great enabler, which would lead to the enhancement of the quality of experience. Mahendra Nath Vyas, Executive Director, Planetcast Media Services, also added that while AR/VR and gaming were the future technology that would ride on the 5G networks, there was also a huge opportunity to unlock content creation in remote areas with 5G.

However, content creation in itself had also evolved with OTT. Nimisha Pandey, Chief Content Officer, Hindi Originals, ZEE5, shared that OTT had enabled the content creators and the entire ecosystem to create content for small taste clusters, with the decision making no longer based on the mass audience. Ultimately, Pandey also believed that it all began with a great story, and it was important to give value to both passion and craft.

Avinash Kaul, CEO, Network18, Managing Director, A+E Networks TV18, summed up the optimism for the industry in his closing keynote. With video now having been democratized, consumers have never had it better. And with the online video ecosystem having opened up, funding and content had also poured in, with money coming into the ecosystem from all sources. From a consumer’s point of view, it was now utopian. “The future of video has always been bright and will continue to shine brighter and brighter,” said Kaul.