Nearly 25 pc Indian consumers prefer to view content on OTT platforms for free
The report noted that 14 percent of Indian respondents would like to pay a higher fee to be free from ads and 14 percent would like an option where they can customise their price and ad packages.
Nearly 25 percent of Indian consumers prefer to watch content on the over the top (OTT) platforms for free, says a report. OTT refers to film and television content provided via internet connection rather than a cable or satellite provider.
As many as 25 percent of Indian respondents want to pay nothing and watch ads as a trade-off to consuming content, while 25 percent selected to pay a lower fee with limited ads, according to 2019 Asia OTT Research Report by Brightcove, a global provider of cloud services for video.
The report, conducted with online market research and data analytics firm YouGov.
The report surveyed 9,000 participants from across Asia, including 1,000 Indian consumers and noted that 14 percent of Indian respondents would like to pay a higher fee to be free from ads and 14 percent would like an option where they can customise their price and ad packages.
On the ads per break, 22 percent Indians found two ads as an acceptable advertising load while 13 percent were open to view three ads per break.
It observed that nearly 80 percent of the Indian respondents are open to a hybrid model of reduced price subscription video on-demand (SVOD) services with some ad funding.
"Thirty-five percent of respondents said they might be open to a reduced monthly subscription package that serves ads depending on the price, whereas 44 percent said they would definitely sign up, representing a potential market size of 79 percent of respondents polled favouring this hybrid option," it said.
In India, it found that 48 percent are current users, while 19 percent had their subscription lapsed.
The report also found that 60 percent of lapsed consumers plan to sign-up for OTT services again in the future.
It noted that 37 percent of Indian respondents were willing to pay less than $1 per month, while 27 percent said they would pay $1-4 per month, and 16 percent would pay $5-9 per month.
Content is the primary driver for subscribing to multiple OTT services in India, it found, with 42 percent of respondents stating that they wanted more content options, content which satisfied the needs of an entire family and content not being available on any single OTT service.
Offline downloads (42 percent), access on mobile (42 percent), and using less data on mobile while streaming (40 percent) were the top three OTT service features most Indian consumers wanted.
