You Tube witnesses surge in video consumption in Indian

Video-sharing website You Tube is experiencing a "staggering growth" in consumption of content in Indian languages with more than 1,200 video creators in the country crossing the million-subscriber base, a top company official said on Thursday.

The website currently has over 265 million users per month in India and 60 per cent of content consumption is outside the metro cities, he said.

"We are witnessing a staggering growth in content consumption in Indian languages. More than 1200 creators in the country have crossed the million-subscriber threshold. Just five years ago there were only two creators with one million subscribers," said Satya Raghavan, the director of content partnerships of You Tube in India.

Over 95 per cent of the online video consumption is in Indian languages and Bengali content is growing more than 100 per cent year-on-year in watch time, he said.

"About 60 per cent of content consumption actually happens outside metros and there is huge demand from consumers for the content across categories such as dance, music, comedy, education, food, tech, entertainment and learning," Raghavan said.

The online platform claimed that online video content in Indian languages is becoming a primary driver for internet usuage as less than 20 per cent of the country's population is conversant in English.

Raghavan said the language ecosystem on the online platform has been deepening as the contents in languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, and Malayalam are getting richer while videos in Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati and Marathi are gaining momentum.

According to him, more than 35 Bengali channels have now crossed the one million subscriber mark, over 65 channels in the language have subscribers between 5 lakh to one million and about 500 Bengali channels have more than one lakh subscribers.