At 250 million unique visitors a month, MX Player has for long been in the same bracket as YouTube (454 million) and Meta (324 million) in reach.
Bhay traces the life and mysterious death of Gaurav Tiwari, a paranormal explorer. It is -- along with Mitti, Aashram (season 3), Half CA, and Who's Your Gynac (all second seasons), as well as dubbed Turkish and Korean dramas -- among the 100 shows Amazon MX Player is dropping through the year.
"We are the only premium, AVOD (advertising-based video on demand) service," says Karan Bedi, director and head of Amazon MX Player. The service will always be free, says its promos.
At 250 million unique visitors a month, MX Player has for long been in the same bracket as YouTube (454 million) and Meta (324 million) in reach.
However, unlike the user-generated videos from YouTube and Instagram, MX relies on originals, a la any subscription over-the-top (OTT) media platform.
Its audience size is roughly five times Prime Video's, Amazon's pay service.
Not surprisingly, Amazon paid a (reported) $100 million to buy MX Player from the Times Group in 2024. It then merged it with its miniTV service.
"We had an interesting play with miniTV when the MX opportunity came," says Gaurav Gandhi, vice-president, Asia Pacific and MENA (Middle East and North Africa), Prime Video, adding, "It made sense for us to get into the pure AVOD space. It brings large reach for us overall."
Daoud Jackson, senior analyst, media, entertainment and advertising, MENA, Turkey and India, at UK-based Informa TechTarget, feels MX is Amazon's way of shortcutting to a large audience.
That is the first thing that MX brings to Amazon in India.
As the decade-old streaming business enters its next phase of growth, almost every OTT is trying to get a larger audience. Most offer their shows in six or more Indian languages.
Netflix has brought WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) to India. JioHotstar is pushing cricket for more than half the year, and SonyLIV is using unscripted shows such as Shark Tank India.
Prime Video has been building itself up as an entertainment hub. It aggregates 25 other OTT brands such as Lionsgate, Crunchyroll etc, and offers over 8,500 movies on rental. MX Player is, arguably, its biggest bet for reach in India.
The rush for reach
The Rs 35,600 crore/Rs 356 billion (ad plus pay) streaming video business grew to 125 million subscribers last year. That is an audience of roughly 375 million Indians.
But if JioHotstar, SonyLIV, Netflix or Prime Video, among others, want to grow, they have to plug into the vastness and diversity of India, much like TV, which reaches 900 million Indians.
The top-end, metro game has been played. Now the middle- and lower-tiers, across geographies and audiences, need to be tackled.
This means getting into the free, ad-supported, and user-generated territory where Google (YouTube), Meta (Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook), and DD Freedish (Dangal, Goldmines, etc) rule. It means more popular programming, more sports, movies, and gaming content.
"We were looking at how customers move from television into the ad-supported space online," says Gandhi.
That is a space MX Player, along with YouTube, has long occupied.
When the Times Group bought MX Player in June 2018 from South Korea-based J2 Interactive, for $140 million (about Rs 1,000 crore/Rs 10 billion), it was just a video player. About half its 350 million users (then) were from India. Times managed to migrate a chunk of the users from the basic player to the OTT. Bedi has been a part of that journey since it began.
"We were the only people on this (AVOD) boat. Now, most of the market has coalesced around the thought that the market needs a combo of pay plus free," he says.
"In the last five years, all the growth in TV has been in FTA (free-to-air)."
Note that MX's viewership is roughly the same as that of DD Freedish. The State-operated free DTH service has been one of the biggest successes in the video business in recent times.
In 2019, MX raised $110.8 million (under Rs 800 crore/Rs 8 billion) from Chinese Internet giant Tencent. Five years later, it was sold to Amazon, the world's (and India's) largest retail site.
Commerce meets video
Open the Amazon app, and you find MX directly integrated into it. It is not under Prime Video but a separate brand. The idea is to drive both retail sales and ad revenues across smaller towns. This is the second thing that MX does for Amazon.
Video has for long been the glue that brought consumers to retail sites. It is the premise on which Amazon launched Prime Video in 2006. Over the last few years, another layer of revenues got added.
"Advertising on retail platforms (or retail media) is driving 50 per cent of overall advertising growth in the top six APAC (Asia-Pacific) markets, including China, Japan, and India," says Vivek Couto, executive director, Media Partners Asia, a Singapore-based media consultancy.
Globally, Amazon made over $56 billion in ad revenue on its shopping site. It has, along with Meta and YouTube, become a major force in the online ad game.
In India, advertisers spent Rs 14,700 crore (Rs 147 billion), or a fifth of all the digital ad money, on retail media to catch consumers at the point-of-sale in 2024. Add this figure to the Rs 26,500 crore (Rs 265 billion) spent on video advertising, plus the nudge MX will give to small-town sales, and the picture becomes clearer.
"The challenge will be to bring on board more female audiences," says Jackson. "(In terms of users) Amazon is very male and MX is incredibly male (on mobile). Linear (TV) is strong with female audiences, and that gets advertisers."
Video app usage on the mobile, across OTTs, is overwhelmingly dominated by men.
"The viewership split on Amazon MX Player is 70 per cent male and 30 per cent female across various distribution platforms. That is in line with the general skew in India's digital landscape," says Bedi.
He points out that given MX's scale, this viewership is significant.
"On the back of this, we have seen success with several beauty brands like Mamaearth, Aqualogica, Sugar Cosmetics, and many more. These brands have seen CTRs (click-through rates) of 5-6 times the industry average," he says.
That is because MX's ad offerings are integrated with multiple Amazon services, and leverage its shopping signals. The behavioural analysis they provide leads to better targeting.
The simple business of telling stories to audiences is turning bigger and increasingly strategic.
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