Indian economic directions and
subsequent entry by players are generally dominated by one successful use case.
In India, most of the companies hesitate to take the first step whereas the
case is just reversed when it comes to other developed companies. That is the
reason that being one of the greatest mind aggregator, Indian companies always
act as service providers instead of owner of product or services or
applications or be it anything else.
With the ongoing revolution
underway in Telecom sector and slow death of Telecom operator centric Mobile VAS segment due to very stringent regulatory guideline in India; many VAS
companies moved into Applications or platform or service category to survive.
Reliance Jio, helped the ecosystem with a hope that India will be the market of
data user and data centric products or applications or games or anything else
will get adopted like forest fire.
Indians are generally fond of
music, movies and cricket. The fall of MVAS business at operator level prompted
major players like Hungama and Saavn to quickly change their strategy and moved
into Application based content delivery through Device manufacturing delivery.
Hungama even went one step further an launched their movie based applications.
The slight success of both the player brought in number of players like Sony, Zee,
Star, VIU, Eros and many more. Ironically, most of them went with open wallet
and acquired user through heavy promotional activities instead of organic
growth. Indian Telecom sector with Data ARPU of less than $2.25 in best case
scenario trumped most of them as their content adoption went high for free
content or till the offer period whereas they failed to get the expected growth
rate for the paid userbase. I do agree that Indian Smartphone segment is
growing but at the same time the mindset of the end user is to access default
Video application YouTube.
In my point of view, the video
applications player should come out with disruptive engagement model with end
user wherein user start paying for the content instead of relying on
advertisement which is not long term option
