Problem Statement

How can India’s homegrown OTT platforms rise to the level of global leaders like Netflix, Amazon
Prime Video

Objective

To perform descriptive analysis on the dataset of movies on streaming platforms and gain insights
and understanding about the functioning and business workflow of the OTT platforms from the
media and entertainment industry.

Introduction

We are living in a world that is driven on the wheels of technology. It has captured every aspect of
human existence and has become an inseparable part of our lives. The technological revolution and
software boom have deeply impacted the entertainment industry. The introduction of Over-the-top
platforms which stream Video/Audio content is the latest breakthrough in the era of Digital
disruption. The prevalence of OTT and Media Streaming intermediaries have caused a paradigm shift
in the Entertainment industry at large and the Video-On-Demand (VOD) industry in particular. It has
posed a serious threat to the omnipresent yet traditional mode - Television which is still the
universal source of entertainment to the world population and the Indian masses alike. As
aforementioned, one can observe a paradigm shift of viewers towards OTT Platforms especially by
those who belong to the generation of Millennials and Post-Millennials. This can significantly be
observed in urban areas which have greater access to internet connectivity coupled with widespread
usage of smart phones making it a win-win situation for online content providers. The success of OTT
Platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hot Star etc can be attributed to 'Digitalization' as they
have proven to be game changers in the Entertainment industry.

Industry Analysis

The OTT market in India is expected to emerge as the sixth-largest OTT market in the world by 2024.
The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28.6% over the next four years. The expected revenue
is to touch US$ 2.9billion. OTT video, along with Internet advertising, video games and e-sports and
music, radio and podcasts make the top 4 segments which are expected to find revenue growth in
India over the next 4 years according to the Media and Entertainment Outlook 2020, a report by,
PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is documented in the report that the traditional sectors like print and
cinema may face severe impacts due to changing consumer behaviour. On the other hand, digital
entertainment and media which includes OTT would have positive impact. The current pandemic has
been a boon for the OTT platforms.

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 Graph: Yearly revenue of different OTT and video segment platforms

Introduction of the topic and analysis of business domain

Most companies held positive and favourable views about the potential business expansion of OTT
platforms in India. This profound optimism was a result of the skyrocketing levels of internet
consumption coupled with a drastic increase in the adoption of advanced technological gadgets
which made India a lucrative market in the OTT segment/industry. The country has the potential to
become a hub for local content development for various OTT platforms and this fact has also been
highlighted in the KPMG report which states that 60 percentage of viewership is attracted across
television and OTT platforms in India. With the onset of the lockdown, there has been an increased
demand for in-home entertainment and as a result, new viewers have been subscribing to OTT
platforms as a source for their daily entertainment. Big production houses and media houses are
looking forward to collaborating with OTT platform as the mass is avoiding out-of-home options
(theatres, concerts, plays etc). Since global leaders like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video etc are already
capitalising on this unprecedented opportunity, Indian OTT platforms should also focus on the same
and make the most of this golden time period. Between February 2020 and March 2020, Netflix
witnessed a surge in viewers by 30 percent. One of the top 30 domestic OTT players, Zee5 has seen
its viewership rise by 45 percent and number of subscribers grow by 80 percent. As stated by Zee5
spokesperson, this growth reiterates the fact 'Content is the king' in the media-entertainment
industry.

Pre-existing issues with the Indian OTT platforms

• Cut-throat competition: Global leaders like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video among others
occupy a lion's share in the Indian market making it a highly competitive space for
homegrown OTT platforms. Hence, to stifle their domination, indigenous platforms have to
strategize and sway the viewers/subscribers of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video etc in their
favour by streaming quality content which is on par with the standards set by these foreign
platforms.
• Diverse user base of India: India is home to many diverse cultures and languages. The user
preference, content choice, preferred language, ideology and interest varies significantly.
This adds up to the pressure of the homegrown platforms to cater to such a diverse user

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 base. It also seems like a financially instable proposition to fulfil the vast variety of content
demanded, on a single platform.
• Poor Infrastructure: Uneven broadband infrastructure in some parts of India does not allow
a subscriber to enjoy the best video quality after subscribing to the platform. This acts as a
barrier to the adoption of OTT platforms especially in rural parts of India. Lack of stable
internet connection and poor digital literacy in these remote areas discourage viewers from
subscribing to these platforms even when content in the local vernacular is made available
to them.
• Pricing policy: Indian consumers are price-conscious. A majority of Indian consumers are
reluctant towards spending money on entertainment purposes. The Indian OTT platforms
can try to penetrate markets by following a low-price policy. However, it will be a short-lived
promotional gimmick as they would need huge amounts of funding to back such an
expensive promotional campaign. To further add to their woes, the existing players have the
financial backing to offer much lower prices and control the market.
• Piracy: OTT players in India generate a very large amount of traffic by live streaming the TV
programs. As a result, data leakage and piracy cut down the profits of these platforms.

Description of the dataset used

We have downloaded the data of movies streaming on these OTT platforms from the
website Kaggle.com. Our dataset provides us with the details of the content present on OTT
platform giants like Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, Amazon Prime video and Hulu. The size of the
data is 1.6MB. It’s a CSV file and has 16 columns. These columns serve as attributes, based
on which we were able to draw insights and suggest recommendations. It contains a total of
16,744 rows which has provided us with a large number of movies to help us analyse the
trend of content followed by OTT leaders.

Steps involved

1. Data Processing: The data downloaded in the form of CSV format had to be converted into
an Excel based workbook in order to connect it with Tableau.
2. Data Cleaning: We looked for duplicates in our dataset. We cleaned the data by removing
null values, empty spaces, blanks and duplicates.
3. Data Analysis: We utilized data visualization tool Tableau to present the data in a graphical
format We analysed the data of the global leaders like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video etc with
respect to different attributes. The parameters which our dataset provided include Title of
the Movie, Year of launch, Age group, IMDb ratings, Countries, Genre, Directors and
availability on the four platforms. Based on our interpretations from the dataset of the
predominant attribute we tried to suggest improvements in the existing setup. Our
suggestions will help Indian OTT platforms to up the ante with respect to the global leaders
and to maximise their reach among the Indian masses.

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Analysis

Graph 1:

• The above graph, we have mapped the number of movies available for different age
groups on the respective OTT platforms.
• From the graph we can see that the majority of the content present on Netflix falls in the
18+ age group category and the same goes for Prime Video and Hulu. While a majority
of the content available on Disney+ Hotstar caters to all the age groups.

Interpretations
From the graph above, we can see that these big market leaders do not sufficiently
represent the entertainment needs of the younger population of the country (that is the age
group which is less than 18 years). This younger population category should also be targeted
by the homegrown OTT platforms. It would be easier for Indian OTT platforms to capitalize
over this category since the competition would not be as stiff as in the case of the 18+
category.

Graph 2:

• Here we have mapped the countries with the IMDb ratings of the available content in
those countries on Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, Prime Video and Hulu.

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 • We can observe that in most countries the content with higher ratings is preferred by
the big OTT players like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Disney+ Hotstar.

Interpretations
The homegrown OTT platforms should focus on including high-viewer rated shows on their
platforms in order to provide content which is preferred by a larger set of people.

Graph 3:

• We have tried to visually represent our data of the run time by considering the country
list which includes India on Y-axis and runtime in minutes on the X-axis.
• The graph depicts that the top 20 trending movies in India fall in the duration of 108 min
to 145 min.

Interpretations
Based on our analysis we can deduce that the Indian OTT platforms should pay more
attention towards the movies or shows that fall within the duration bracket of 108-145 mins.

Analysis of OTT Platforms and their content

Netflix - Countries

As we can see, the majority of

the content on Netflix is US-
based. Indian based content is
the second most popular on
Netflix. Content from the
United Kingdom and Canada is
increasingly becoming popular
as they occupy the 3rd and 4th
position respectively.

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 Disney+ Hotstar - Countries

More than half of the content

on Disney+ Hotstar is occupied
by the US-based content. The
next popular one is from United
Kingdom.

Hulu - Countries

Almost half of the content available

is US based. United Kingdom and
Canada being the other dominant
ones.

Amazon Prime Video - Countries

Similar to Hulu here also US based

content occupies almost half of the
available content. The second one is
United Kingdom followed by India.

It can be concluded from the above graphs that Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are the two most
popular platforms with respect to the India based content. Indian OTT platforms can observe these
players and learn from them to improvise their service.

Tableau Dashboard

The consolidated display of all the insights we created using different charts and tools were
converted to a dashboard. The collection of several views on one screen made it easy for us to
compare data simultaneously. The data in the dashboard is connected with the data on the sheets,
which eliminates the need of explicitly refreshing the dashboard, in case you have made any changes
to the data on the sheet. This makes the dashboard really interactive and user friendly. We got to
know about the specific range of movie ratings (IMDb) preferred by viewers. Along with this, movies
which are released in India and the movie runtime preference was also derived.

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Usefulness for stakeholders

The stakeholders involved here are the owners of these domestic OTT platforms, the audience and
also the content creators which involve producers, directors etc. For the owners it would be useful
to have these insights which would help them in planning, organising as well as customizing the
content available on their respective OTT platforms.

The customized content would really make the audience happy. They would feel the worth of the
service and would like to explore the platform more if the available content is unique and according
to their taste. Content creators who are having a hard time because of the pandemic can make the
best use of this opportunity to utilise these OTT platforms. They would be able to work for new type
of content. Based on these insights they can have a fair understanding of what content performs
well in terms of viewership on OTT platforms. Switching over to the OTT platforms would help them
increase the reach of their content.

Limitations of the study

Lack of data of Indian OTT: Since we were not able to find data of Indian OTT platforms it was not
possible for us to draw comparisons between homegrown and global OTT platforms.