Young, male, metropolitan: The face of the Indian OTT viewer

Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad account for 33% of the total active paid subscriptions, finds a survey

At 9.7 million people a month, Delhi has the largest OTT (over-the-top) audience in the country, closely followed by Mumbai at 9.3 million and Bengaluru at 8.7 million. These three cities also have the maximum penetration of OTT platforms and together constitute 8 per cent of the 353 million monthly audience in India, says The Ormax OTT Audience Report, 2021.

Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad account for 33 per cent of the total active paid subscriptions in the country, the report says.

The first-ever mapping of the Indian audience for streaming video — defined as people who have watched video on OTT at least once in the last one month — by Mumbaibased consulting firm Ormax Media was done from May to July 2021 and had a sample size of 12,000 people across the country.

As the market for watching drama and series online booms, more than 60 OTTS jostle for space in India. From ~5,500 crore in 2018, revenues almost doubled to ~10,700 crore in 2020, according to Media Partners Asia data.

The Ormax report, shared with Business Standard before its release next week, estimates that 40.7 million people in the OTT universe are a paying SVOD (subscription video-ondemand) audience. But these are not the only people watching paid content. The non-paying segment, which watches pay-driven video on subscriptions taken by their family members or friends, or via telecom packages, is sizeable at 69.8 million. Together, these comprise 31 per cent (over 110 million) of the total OTT universe in India.

“For the last few years, the whole industry has been talking of SVOD and AVOD (advertising video-on-demand). This made us question the whole terminology of SVOD and AVOD,” says Shailesh Kapoor, CEO, Ormax Media. That is the first interesting insight from the report.

The second, somewhat confusing but interesting one is: An Indian OTT subscriber pays for 2.4 brands on average.

That takes the total paying population to 96 million. Think of it as going to the theatre. More than a billion tickets were sold in India in 2019, but that doesn’t mean a billion people saw a film. The average filmgoer paid for 3-4 tickets in a year.

The third set of findings is on the demographic cuts. The report breaks up the OTT universe into four segments: The paying OTT subscribers (11.7 per cent), the non-paying OTT subscribers who consume paid content (19.8 per cent), the ones who watch only advertising-driven content (44.9 per cent), and the ones who watch only Youtube and social media videos (23.8 per cent).

All four segments have a male and urban skew, which is most pronounced in the SVOD (paying) segment. In contrast, the AVOD and Youtube + Social Media only segments are heavily present in markets with a population of less than 1 million and in rural India. Maharashtra is by far the leading state for the SVOD (paying) segment, followed by Aptelangana and Uputtarakhand.

The indexing from population to monetisation is the best for the 22-30 years age group, where 14 per cent population contributes 31 per cent of the 96 million paid subscriptions, says the report. That seems strange, given that people in the 40s and above would have better purchasing power.

“It is not an affordability issue; it is a taste issue. The 40plus population is more linear,” says Kapoor. The metros and the 1-7.5 million population markets contribute only 10 per cent to the total population but 24 per cent to the OTT universe. Their share of paid subscriptions is a huge 59 per cent. This, says Kapoor, highlights the opportunity available to expand the SVOD market outside the big cities.

Powell says Fed may slow bond buying by year end

The Fed cut its benchmark rate to nearly zero and relaunched the crisis-era purchase program last year at the onset of the pandemic. Powell cautioned that a move to begin winding down the bond-buying program should not be interpreted as a sign that rate hikes would soon follow. “The timing and pace of the coming reduction in asset purchases will not be intended to carry a direct signal regarding the timing of interest rate liftoff, for which we have articulated a different and substantially more stringent test,” Powell said.

“We have said that we will continue to hold the target range for the federal funds rate at its current level until the economy reaches conditions consistent with maximum employment, and inflation has reached 2 per cent and is on track to moderately exceed 2 per cent for some time,” he said.

“We have much ground to cover to reach maximum employment, and time will tell whether we have reached 2 per cent inflation on a sustainable basis.”

Quarterly projections published in June showed seven of 18 FOMC participants thought it would be appropriate to begin raising rates next year, while six more expected rate increases would become appropriate by 2023. Powell spoke as investors awaited a decision from President Joe Biden on whether to renominate him for a second term or pick someone else.

Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Biden advisers were considering recommending Powell for reappointment. Total US employment is still about 6 million jobs below prepandemic levels. June and July were strong months for hiring as restrictions on service industries were lifted across the country, but the recent spread of the coronavirus delta variant is raising uncertainty about prospects for the months ahead. The Fed chair stuck to the central bank’s message that the current bout of inflation is likely to be transitory, emphasising that the recent rise “is so far largely the product of a relatively narrow group of goods and services that have been directly affected by the pandemic and the reopening of the economy” and should be expected to dissipate. He pointed to inflation expectations measures as a sign that consumers, businesses and investors also share that assessment, and highlighted the risk that downward pressures on inflation, of the kind observed over the last decade, could reassert themselves once the pandemic ends.

“While the underlying global disinflationary factors are likely to evolve over time, there is little reason to think that they have suddenly reversed or abated,” Powell said. “It seems more likely that they will continue to weigh on inflation as the pandemic passes into history.”

This year’s symposium, typically a high-profile retreat attended by central bankers around the world, was originally slated to return to its usual in-person format, but the Kansas City Fed scrapped that plan on August 20 amid rising coronavirus case counts in Teton County, Wyoming. During last year’s virtual proceedings, Powell unveiled a new strategy for monetary policy making which marked the conclusion of an internal review that lasted nearly 20 months.

The new framework dictates Fed officials allow the economic expansion to progress further than they have in the past before raising interest rates, to drive unemployment rates down faster and allow low-income groups to share in the benefits from a strong economy. That also means allowing inflation to overshoot the central bank’s 2 per cent target for a time, to make up for periods coming out of downturns when it under runs the target.