Is Netflix Struggling in India?
Netflix is
the world’s largest OTT platform and is rapidly making its influence in its
streaming services in the US and European countries. Unfortunately, Netflix is
struggling to penetrate the desired market share due to a plethora of reasons
which are counting. The most popular and in-demand online media streaming
platform in India is Hotstar.
Hotstar has a huge count of target audiences within just 1 year of launch whereas Netflix was launched in 2016 and Hotstar a lot earlier in 2015. Hotstar provides free access to many TV shows and Movies streamed across various Television networks. This is the reason why many Indians still love Hotstar. Hotstar has about a huge market share of 70% in all local online streaming programmes. Netflix has a pricing strategy that is 2 times more than the other OTTs which are operational in India.
Netflix is termed as a premium platform, having that it was priced too high for its subscriptions compared to other leading names in the market like Amazon Prime and Disney Hotstar. Netflix’s starting monthly basic plan ranges huge and due to cost issues make India dull and unattractive for expecting market share. Yet another prominent reason why Netflix is slow in penetrating the Indian market is because of less focus on regional content. India is a diverse country with people following various cultures and speaking many languages. Indian people still prefer to watch content in Hindi rather than just English. Netflix fails here to execute ways to bring about regional content.
Netflix people are still facing issues in protecting the piracy of the content of their productions. Indian markets being price-sensitive are looking for less expensive or no payment options. Most web series are readily available on the internet in some way or the other. If the content can be available at a cost-effective medium then why pay for it. Before entering the Indian Market, Netflix was already an established billion-dollar company. They didn’t take pain to invest in advertisements, be it just giving digital ads. Word of mouth is the main crux of marketing and Netflix failed to play the part in the Indian market due to less or no money spent on advertising. On the other hand, Disney has made a great move toward OTT platforms.
So, these were some of the fine reasons for which Netflix is finding it hard to find a place of revenue in India.
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