The 'linearisation' of streaming: How OTTs are becoming more like TV

Shah Rukh Khan was the highlight of the February 3 event announcing Netflix India’s slate of 26 shows and films for 2025. It includes his son Aryan’s directorial venture, The Ba***ds of Bollywood, season three of its Emmy award-winning show Delhi Crime, the second seasons of Kohrra and Rana Naidu, among others.  

But arguably the most interes­ting piece of programming will be the World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, on April 1. “Every single format of WWE will be available in India, whether it is Raw, NXT or SmackDown. After the US, India is the most important market for WWE,” says Monika Shergill, vice- president, content, Netflix India. 

WWE, which had about 50 million Indians glued to its formats in 2019, is not just an expensive and massy piece of programming. It is also an indicator of where the Indian streaming market is headed — towards scale, reach, and profitability. 

“There was so much consolidation over the last 15-24 months,” says Deepak Dhar, group CEO Banijay Asia and Endemol Shine India (the media and entertainment company that has produced Bigg Boss, MasterChef, Khatron Ke Khiladi, etc).  

Reliance acquired a bevy of businesses that rolled three OTT brands — Disney+Hotstar, Voot and JioCinema — into JioHotstar. As telcos pruned their bundles, subscribers fell from about 112 million in 2022 to 96 million in 2023, going by Media Partners Asia data. Most large OTTs right-sized their budgets, keeping expenditure on content more or less stagnant. It was chaotic, but these 24 months have separated the “men from the boys,” says Vijay Koshy, president, TVF (Panchayat, Gullak, Kota Factory, etc). 

The churn has been good for the ₹35,600 crore (ad plus pay) streaming video business. In 2024, subscribers grew to 125 million. That is an audience of roughly 375 million Indians. 

But if JioStar, SonyLIV, Netflix, or Amazon Prime Video, among others, want to grow, they have to plug into the vastness and diversity of India, much like TV, which reaches 900 million Indians, did.  

First, they need to reach all the 650 million Indians using broadband internet on some device or the other, say analysts. Then, there are the 50-odd million connected TV homes (about 200 million viewers).  

For streaming video, which took off eight years ago, the top-end metro game has been played. Now the middle and lower tiers, across geographies and audiences, need to be tapped. That means getting into the free, ad-supported and user-generated territory where everyone – from Google (YouTube) and Meta (Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook) to DD Freedish and a clutch of free channels like Dangal and Goldmines – rule. It means more popular programming choices, sports, movies and gaming content. 

“AVOD (advertising-based video on demand) is not new; TV was ad-driven. But we are (now) competing with Google and Meta, which sell impressions for pennies and have no content costs,” points out Sameer Nair, managing director, Applause Entertainment (Black Warrant, Scam 199,  etc). This means taking the battle to the bigger ₹65,400 crore digital media market and the ₹69,600 crore television broadcasting one. 

This phase of growth means different things for different firms. 

 

 

Diverse strategies

  “We are an entertainment hub, not just an SVOD (subscription video on demand) player,” says Gaurav Gandhi, vice-president, Asia Pacific and Middle East-North Africa (MENA), Prime Video, on segmenting the market. Beginning 2021, Prime Video started aggregating other services such as Lionsgate and manoramaMAX, among 25 others currently.  

Then came movie rentals — essentially cashi­ng in on the window between the theatrical and SVOD release of a new film. Prime now offers over 8,500 titles. Almost two-thirds of its custom­ers stream content in four or more Indian languages.  

Its series, Panchayat, is one of India’s most popular OTT shows. Panchayat’s Tamil remake, Thalaivettiyaan Paalayam, released last year, and the Telugu one, Sivarapalli, came last month. “The team carries the KPI  (key performance indicator) of saying how deep the show goes and how many cities it is watched in,” says Gandhi.  

On the product side, there is Prime Lite (for single/two-member households). In September 2024, Amazon acquired MX Player from Times Internet. The free-to-watch Amazon MX Player, which claims to have 250 million unique visitors, just unveiled a slate of over 100 new shows. 

SonyLIV is known for cerebral shows on contemporary history such as Freedom at Midnight and Rocket Boys. That drove its uptake to about 33 million subscribers. It uses unscripted shows such as Shark Tank India or Million Dollar Listing: India, its latest offering, to drive reach. The recent season four of Shark Tank India has seen SonyLIV’s reach across 42  Tier- II towns double. 

Unscripted, incidentally, is a rising demand from across OTTs. “Our pipeline is skewed towards non-fiction,” says Dhar of Banijay.  

JioHotstar is likely banking on the reach of parent Reliance’s 461 million Jio subscribers. Another large OTT has been reportedly asking producers to cook up 100-episode shows instead of a 7-10 episode series. Many now stagger the episodes in a new season to keep the audience coming back, or they drop the latest in a show at a fixed time, to encourage appointment viewing, a la TV.  

As connected TVs take off, habit is becoming a part of OTT viewing. So is family watching. “If the whole family can sit and watch a show together, you have a hit because you are cutting across age groups,” points out Koshy. “It is getting closer to TV in one sense, but it is also very different because of what the technology allows you to do,” thinks Shergill. 

Much of what India is going through is playing out in the rest of the world, too. A recent Omdia report details the growing ‘linearisation’ of streaming in 2025.  

Every major SVOD service has introduced an ad-tier. Last year, 24 per cent of SVOD revenues in America came from the ad-tier. Late in 2022, Netflix introduced an ad-tier in 12 markets, excluding India. The plan, priced at roughly half the basic no-commercials one, now accounts for more than half of all new Netflix signups in regions where it is available. 

The trouble with cheap popularity

  This linearisation could mean the ₹1 crore per episode series are over. Production houses that have scale across TV and OTT, and can get costs right, are the ones that will survive this phase.  

Koshy compares TVF, which has, in the last five years, scaled from 4-15 shows to a Maruti car: “It is not fancy but it does its job, is reliable and cost- effective.” That is what the business needs to hit scale and profitability, analysts say. 

Does this mass family version of streaming mean a dip in quality?  

Remember TV slipped into low-end program­ming in its bid for reach? As programming head and then chief executive officer of the erstwhile Star India, Nair brought in Kaun Banega Crorepati and daily soaps in the early part of the millennium. He points out that “Dangal TV may be the number one channel with maximum viewership, but it does not have the maximum revenue.  Social media sells fleeting impressions while an ad-free Netflix has 302 million subscribers (700 million viewers) worldwide.” He adds, “Some costs can be rationalised, but quality remains the best business plan.”