India's video audience is shifting as streaming rewrites viewing habits

From 10-second episodes to 10-hour seasons, the deluge brought by streaming and on-demand services is now changing how Indians entertain themselves

Sheldon Cooper, Leonard Hofstadter, Rajesh Koothrappali, and Howard Wolowitz work at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech. The journey of these socially inept scientists as they bumble through life, relationships, and work conundrums makes for a witty, wise, and hugely popular show.

 

The Big Bang Theory (CBS) began in 2007 and ended with 12 seasons in 2019. It is a global hit that has been licensed across streaming platforms. This columnist has watched and rewatched it dozens of times on Netflix. Ditto for its spinoff, Young Sheldon (2017-2024; seven seasons). Not surprisingly, then, the algorithm kept pushing reels from the latest spinoff, Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage, until I found it on JioHotstar. The titles may vary, but the journey for each of us is similar — you see some reels, or someone you know does, and you end up watching a show or a film on OTT.

 

Ten years ago, in 2016, you probably watched Nagin, The Kapil Sharma Show or Bigg Boss on TV. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video had just come into India. YouTube had been around for eight years but was used, largely, for search, to listen to music or to figure things out. If you were young, you might have watched series like TVF’s Little Things or Tripling that began on YouTube. Streaming has changed what we watch and how we watch it, but a decade ago, it wasn’t quite the force it is now.

 

Three fabulously done recent reports capture different parts of this change.

 

The first, IMDB’s “Ten Years of Streaming in India” uses the 250 million monthly visitors to IMDB worldwide to list the top 10 shows (Mirzapur, Criminal Justice, The Family Man, The B***s of Bollywood, Sacred Games etc), the biggest creators (TVF, Applause, D2R Films), the stars (Pankaj Tripathi, Manoj Bajpayee), the streamers (Netflix, JioHotstar, Prime Video, YouTube, among others). The shift from overwhelmingly crime-led programming to broader genres reflects the evolution of the audience and of the creative ecosystem.

 

The report doesn’t say this, but what is evident is that, as streamers attempt to scale, they are doing what TV did — get as much of India on their service as possible. That explains why Netflix brought The Kapil Sharma Show or India’s got Latent to its service or why Prime Video aggregates dozens of other services from BBC’s iPlayer to SonyLIV.

 

Much of this comes on the back of some stellar storytelling. Three of the six most durable franchises mentioned in the report — Mirzapur, The Family Man (Prime Video) and Criminal Justice (JioHotstar) — have built worlds that audiences love to revisit to see the characters they have grown fond of: Kaleen Bhaiya, Madhav Mishra, and Srikant Tiwari. Then, there is Panchayat, a sweet, slow look at village life and politics that continues to charm audiences over four seasons, with a fifth in the offing. Musafir Café, Pritam and Pedro are the other gentler shows that move away from the “edgy” obsession that characterised the first round of growth. This abundance of shows and stories has generated revenue, but largely at the expense of television rather than by creating a significantly larger market.

 

That brings this to the second piece of recent research. The Media Partners Asia (MPA) latest numbers show that India’s “screen economy” has gone from $9.5 billion in 2021 to $12.4 billion by the end of this year. Streaming brings in half of this at $6 billion — linear TV is down from over $7 billion to just under $5 billion this year. As the MPA presentation puts it, India has the largest audience, but the smallest wallet.

 

“India generates under $10 per head from screens versus $890 in the US. That gap is the runway.” It estimates that India will hit $15.4 billion across screens by 2031, a compounded annual growth rate of 5 per cent against 2 for China, Japan and Korea.

 

The MPA data has another tiny number of $0.3 billion for microdramas. This brings us to the third report. “Microdramas — The India Story”, an audience research report by Ormax Media and Meta, shows that, unlike big-screen streaming, which is somewhat male-skewed (57:43), microdramas, which are watched mostly on the mobile phone, have a female skew (55:45).

 

This mirrors China and the US, the two largest microdrama markets, where women over 50 make up half the audience. In China, two-thirds of this audience is from Tier-III towns and rural areas. The same is true of India, where viewership is skewed towards urban and rural markets with populations of less than one million. The only similarity with streaming is that a bulk — three-fourths — of the money comes from advertising. Audiences simply don’t pay. In fact, most consumers in India have no clue where they watched a microdrama or what the story was — it is simply “social media” to them.

 

From 10-second episodes to 10-hour seasons, the deluge brought by streaming and on-demand services is now rapidly rewiring audiences. Add artificial intelligence to the mix, and there is no telling what the next set of reports will reveal.

 

         

 

@vanitakohlik