‘TV, mobile and laptop viewing is higher in India than globally’
NEWDELHI: Todd Yellin, vicepresident of product innovation at streaming service Netflix, knows what people used to say— that Bollywood doesn’t travel to the US, and Hollywood doesn’t travel to India. “That’s not true. Our originals do very well in India. Stranger Things is important to India. Narcos has done super well in India. We’re about sharing stories around the world,” said Yellin in an interview with Mint via Google Hangouts from California. Edited excerpts:
Is India a priority market for Netflix?
India is a really important market... We have more and more people hired in Asia from India. We have more people even in California from India, trying to understand what’s unique about the Indian market in terms of what we could send to India and show to grow this service, both technically and content wise.
How does Netflix plan to work around India’s internet challenges?
To solve problems like how to make it super easy to find something to watch on Netlfix? Or how to take something that’s typically quite frustrating—internet challenges, yes, it drives us all crazy. We are doubling down on a lot of technology (investment) on how to stream something without re-buffering at the lowest bit rates.
Any big surprises in the way Indians are consuming Netflix?
A couple of things. I don’t know if this is surprising, but it is different from how the US uses it. Downloading is a much more popular feature in India that it is in the US or Europe. Of course, a big part of that is internet challenges, but when we launched downloading, we had countries like India top of the mind.
I would also say that when it comes to the device mix, if you look globally, around two-thirds of all Netflix viewing is on a TV (screen). In India, while a lot of our viewing is on TV, mobiles and laptops tend to be a little higher here in India than globally.
Since the global expansion, what have you learnt about the Netflix consumer?
We are in all seven continents now as Netflix. We are all around the world. But what we found, in our personalisation of trying to find the right content for the right people— it’s not about geography, it’s not about gender, it’s not about age; it’s really about someone’s personal taste.
Your journey at Netflix so far...
I have been at Netflix for almost 12 years—I started in January of 2006 when the company was 1/25th the size.
The first year at Netflix, we were fending off heavy competition from Blockbuster (a large chain of video rental stores), as we planned to launch a free video add on service in early 2007...
Besides the launch of streaming, the biggest turning point happened in January 2016 when we launched in 130 countries at the same time, including India.