Hotstar rides viewing wave in small cities
Even as television made its way deeper into India, over-the-top platform Hotstar in 2017 saw a significant surge in consumption of its content in non-metro towns and cities, specifically those with populations between 100,000 and one million.
According to Hotstar’s India Watch Report 2017, the platform’s watch time (minutes spent on the service) in small cities during the year grew 4.3 times over 2016. By comparison, cities with more than one million people saw 4.1-times growth and metros 3.5 times.
Cities like Moradabad (22 times), Allahabad (13 times), Hubbali (12 times), and Sonepat (12 times) showed impressive growth. Among states, Jammu & Kashmir led the pack, with 8.3 times growth, followed by Sikkim (7 times) and Assam (6.5 times). “The explosion in access to affordable data is spurring new consumer habits. Three years ago, most new data users would start with messaging, do text search, move on to social platforms and a few brave ones would watch video on the mobile network. This pyramid has been completely inverted. In a world that does not fear data charges, video is very often the first port of call for new data users. Familiar stories, whether TV shows, movies or sports, unconstrained by any language limitation, are acting as powerful triggers to light up their smartphones and their data connections,” said Ajit Mohan, chief executive, Hotstar.
While the consumption base for metros would be higher, the significant growth shown by small cities could also be attributed to the single TV household phenomenon and the government’s ‘Digital India’ push. India, beyond the metros, still consists mainly of households that have one TV set each. Hence, many of them have adapted the second screen — mobile, laptop or tablet — for individual viewing. In the case of J&K and Assam, the higher levels of media darkness (print, radio and television) due to political reasons might have played an important factor in the rise of OTT (Over-The-Top, the term for a content provider selling audio, video, and other media services directly to the consumer over the internet via streaming media as a standalone product, by passing telecommunications, cable or broadcast television service providers) as the preferred medium for media and entertainment consumption.
While the watch time across audiences grew in 2017, women in small cities seemed to be coming online faster than in the metros and bigger cities. Women from New Barrackpore (5 times), Siliguri (6.5 times), Kanchipuram (5 times) and Ranchi (4.7 times) are a step ahead of their peer sin larger cities in consumption growth.
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