OTT adoption to see up to 3-times growth in 3 yrs: VuClip

The adoption of OTT (over the top) platform in the country is likely to see up to three times growth over the next three years, driven by demand for regional content, video on demand provider VuClip said today.

The adoption is currently low due to factors like mobile data quality and tariffs, which are getting addressed now, according to Arun Prakash, president and chief operating officer, VuClip.

"The consumers are in very early stage of adoption of in India. The industry hype is extremely high compared to where the consumer adoption is," Prakash told PTI.

"Consumer adoption while it is in its early stage, over the next few years will rapidly progress in India. Within the next three years, I do expect to see a 2x to 3x growth in digital and OTT adoption in India," he added.

Part of Hong Kong-based PCCW Media Company, VuClip has an OTT platform Viu available in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar.

Viu operates on a freemium model in the OTT space and Prakash noted that the consumer's propensity to pay for premium content is very low in the country.

He observed that appetite for local content and regional content is high in the country and said it was the reason why the company was focusing more on such content.

"Majority of the content being consumed on Viu today is original and regional content. Thus, we are focusing only on regional and original. In the next three years, we will be making 100 Tamil original content," he said.

At present, Viu is offering content in Telugu, Hindi and Tamil; and is evaluating opportunities in other languages like Kannada, Bengali and Marathi.

Prakash added that the company is also doing a lot of research around digital interactive content, while maintaining that augmented reality and virtual reality would also be the areas of interest.