Indian streaming at a high point
Amazon rolls out ‘Mirzapur’, a direct response to Netflix’s ‘Sacred Games’, amid a rise in web content in the country
It is the dead of night as a convoy of black jeeps rumbles through a roughshod Indian city, throwing up clouds of dust as they swerve into an abandoned factory. Leaping out and pulling open the doors of a truck, a bearded man flicks his switchblade and slashes open a bag of drugs, tasting it on the tip of his tongue.
“Maqbool. Lala has kept his word. The dark chocolate is good quality and will give an effective high.”
This isn’t real life, but the latest Hindilanguage offering from Amazon Prime Video and part of Jeff Bezos’s latest ambition: a plan to conquer Bollywood.
Mirzapur, a big-budget nine-part series billed as India’s answer to Narcos — the hit Netflix show based on the exploits of Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar — is Amazon’s new gambit aimed at winning over millions of movie-mad Indian viewers, who are enthusiastically embracing video streaming.
As Amazon, Netflix and others square up for a battle for domination of the rapidly growing global streaming market, they are pumping big money into original regional content like this as they hunt for growth in emerging markets.
And India, home to the world’s most prolific film industry, and where the market for online video streaming is growing by nearly 50 per cent per year and is on track to hit $2 billion (Dh7.34 billion) by 2023 up from $558 million this year, is perhaps the richest prize of all. With a population of 1.3 billion set to outstrip China’s by 2022 and a growing middle class, it represents an eye-watering opportunity. But it is the scope for future growth as smartphone penetration continues to soar from 400 million users today to a projected 700 million by 2022 that has investors excited.
More than 100 million Indians already subscribe to a video streaming service, but the figure is rising quickly.
“India is an incredibly important investment for Amazon,” says Tim Leslie, global vice president of Amazon Prime Video and responsible for building the company’s streaming business outside Europe and the US. “We are making a big investment based on the opportunity to redefine things.”
It’s unlikely to be plain sailing, however. First there is the need to cater for viewers in dozens of different languages — Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and others — while dealing with powerful vested interests in Bollywood and other vibrant regional film industries in Chennai, Bengaluru and Kolkata.
The US giants are also up against tough competition in the form of Hotstar, a streaming service bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox and Viacom18’s Voot. Hotstar, which launched in February 2015 — a head-start of almost two years on Amazon Prime Video — has amassed an estimated 75 million monthly users, mainly through its screening of IPL cricket, which attracts a frenzied following in the subcontinent.
Voot, a free service backed by advertising, has about 22 million.
That compares to just 11 million for Amazon and 5 million for Netflix — although both are growing fast as they invest in original content, TV shows and sign deals with existing Bollywood studios for libraries of existing movies, according to estimates from Counterpoint Research.
Critics have described Mirzapur , an epic crime drama series set in India’s heartland, as a direct response to Netflix’s hit show Sacred Games — a sinister cop thriller set in the seething megacity of Mumbai, which has riveted Indian audiences.
And Leslie is convinced it has similar potential to Narcos to grip viewers far beyond the subcontinent.
“It’s something that we think has global appeal,” he says.