Nearly 25% of the 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 an internet connection rather than a cable or satellite provider. As many as 25% of Indian respondents want to pay nothing and watch ads as a trade-off to consuming content while 25% 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 1000 Indian consumers noted that 14% of Indian respondents would like to pay a higher fee to be free from ads and 14% would like an option where they can customise their price and ad packages.
On the ads per break, 22% of Indians found two ads as an acceptable advertising load, while 13% were open to view three ads per break.
It observed that nearly 80% 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 per cent of respondents said they might be open to a reduced monthly subscription package that serves ads depending on the price, whereas 44% said they would definitely sign up, representing a potential market size of 79% of respondents polled favouring this hybrid option," it said.
In India, it found that 48% are current users, while 19% had their subscription lapsed.
The report found that 60% of lapsed consumers plans to sign-up for OTT services again in the future.
It noted that 37% of Indian respondents were willing to pay less than USD 1 per month, while 27% said they would pay USD 1-4 per month, and 16% would pay USD 5-9 per month.
Content is the primary driver for subscribing to multiple OTT services in India, it found, with 42% 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%), access on mobile (42%), and using less data on mobile while streaming (40%) were the top three OTT service features most Indian consumers wanted.
