The total audience for OTT platforms rose 13.5% to reach 481.1 million in 2023 from 423.8 million in 2022, against a 20% surge seen the previous year, according to media consulting firm Ormax. Streaming apps have now reached 34% of India’s population of 1.4 billion.

“The growth rate (of the OTT universe) has dipped for obvious reasons. Effects of the boost that were linked directly to the pandemic have now gone away, and the rise is more organic now, linked to factors like the price of data and growth of the digital medium itself,” said Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media. The growth rate isn’t low, Kapoor pointed out, especially since penetration in rural areas and small towns, which make up a sizeable part of the population, stands only at 23% compared to the pan-India figure of 34%. OTT platforms now face the challenge of whether consumption can grow beyond the top 20 cities, he added.

In the SVoD (subscription video-on-demand) universe, 16%, or 77.2 million people, are indirect consumers; this means they watch content on these platforms but have not paid for any subscription themselves and watch using their family members’ or friends’ subscriptions. About 8.2%, or 39.5 million people, are paid members who have paid for at least one subscription themselves, but only via telecom packs and not directly. Only 7.6%, or 36.4 million people, are B2C or paid members who have paid for at least one subscription themselves directly (not just via telecom packs).

About 41.2% or 198.1 million people are defined as AVoD+ (advertising-based video-on-demand) in the report, who watch videos only on free streaming platforms, including at least one platform besides YouTube. About 27% of the universe, or 129.9 million people, watch videos only on YouTube and/or social media platforms.

Some segments of the SVoD universe aren’t comparable to the 2022 report, but overall the category has grown by 18% from 130.2 million to 153 million in 2023. SVoD’s share of the total OTT audience in India has gone up marginally from 30.8% last year to 31.8% this year. Meanwhile, the AVoD universe has risen by 7% from 184.5 million to 198.1 million over the same period. The YouTube and social media universe stands at 129.9 million versus 109.2 million, a growth of 19%.

“While 2023 has been an interesting year with sports content, including the IPL (Indian Premier League) and now the World Cup, being made available for free, the overall sense is that all premium content may no longer reside behind a paywall, especially with the entry of a player like JioCinema. Rural masses who are now coming into the ecosystem via the YouTube route may anyway be less likely to pay,” Kapoor said. At the moment, paid subscriptions are driven by metros such as Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, each of which has around 6 million paid subscribers. The top 15 cities together account for 50% of all paid subscriptions, Kapoor said while pointing out that these may be important from a monetization perspective but saturated as far as penetration goes.

Further, while the number of apps subscribed to on average by a user stands at four in the metros, it tends to be less than three in small towns. The overall gender split continues to be skewed towards men, and there is a 70-80% overlap between the OTT and theatre-going universe, both of which tend to be an affluent crowd. The total number of active paid subscriptions stands at 101.8 million.

“The fact is that India’s OTT universe is still 55-60% of its TV universe, and large audiences in mini-metros and small towns haven’t adopted these media. India is such a vast and diverse country that platforms have to start targeting the lowest common denominator through content and marketing,” Kapoor said.

The Ormax OTT Audience Report 2023 is founded on data collected from 12,000 respondents between July and September this year. The data was gathered through a combination of computer-assisted telephonic interviews, online surveys and face-to-face interviews. The study encompassed all states and Union territories, excluding Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. In this report, the OTT universe is defined as individuals in India who have viewed online videos at least once in the past month.

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Updated: 06 Nov 2023, 12:01 AM IST