Netflix looks south to improve India subscriber base
IN SOUTHERN India, devoted fans worship film and TV stars like gods, erecting huge statues of actors which are bathed in milk as part of prayer rituals for a movie’s success.
This is the market Netflix Inc NFLX.O, a streaming laggard in India, is now eager to tap. It has a range of Indian films across various regions to showcase but for TV series – key to keeping viewers loyal to its platform – it only has a few hit shows in Hindi and no TV shows at all in regional languages.
The US company has greenlighted at least six TV shows in southern Indian languages this year, aggressively chasing deals in Tollywood as the Telugu film and TV industry is known, as well as in the Tamil film and TV industry, six people with knowledge of the plans told Reuters.
As prolific as Hindi-language Bollywood and known for flashy, action-packed content, the south Indian film industry is doing extremely well of late, dominating India’s
box office revenue so far this year.
Netflix has “had meetings with pretty much every producer and filmmaker in Mumbai. You will see the results of those meetings by next year,” one of the people, a Tollywood producer, said.
Netflix has long positioned India, with its population of 1.4 billion, as a key market. In 2018, two years after it launched in the country, CEO Reed Hastings predicted its next 100 million subscribers would come from India. But so far it has just 5-6 million, according to analysts’ estimates.
By Hastings’s own admission, Netflix has been frustrated by its lack of success in India relative to its other markets. This new push south also comes at a time when the search for growth has taken on new urgency.
The streaming giant stunned investors last month when it reported a quarterly net loss of subscribers globally for the first time in more than a decade, and predicted deeper losses ahead. Its stock has lost almost half its value since then.
In India, Netflix outperforms rivals in terms of revenue share of the subscription video-on-demand market, commanding 39 per cent share in 2021 compared to nearest rival Disney Plus Hotstar’s DIS.N 23 per cent, according to Media Partners Asia.
But analysts say its subscriber base is too small for comfort. Next to Netflix’s 5-6 million, Disney Plus Hotstar, which owns cricket streaming rights, has about 50 million. Local rival Zee5 ZEE.NS has an estimated 20 million and analysts also gauge Amazon Prime AMZN.O and SonyLIV’s 6758.T subscriber figures to be well above Netflix’s numbers.
India’s market potential “can’t be understated,” says Julia Alexander, director of strategy at US-based Parrot Analytics.
“If Netflix doesn’t try to capitalise on it by creating stronger relationships with local creatives, local studios/production companies, and carving out a real place for itself in India, then someone else will,” she said.