Over 60% of Indian streamers do not pay for streaming OTT Content

Online content in India is seeing a surge in consumption and looks like the upward trajectory will continue in the post-COVID world. Especially now with major movies premiering on OTT platforms and almost 80% of citizens being wary of visiting cinema halls.

PINKVILLA decided to use their social media reach to find out how they are consuming data online focussing on subscription models and an understanding of how many people actually pay for the content they consume. Over 1.6L people voted and here’s the data.

An average of 60% of people do NOT pay for their own subscriptions.

60.98% of people who watch Netflix, watch it through someone else’s account; 61.04% do the same thing on Amazon Prime Video and a whopping 64.64% of people are not using their own account on Disney+ Hotstar. It could be a cost factor or it could also be a thing of sharing within families.

After we managed to get this data through PINKVILLA’s digital platforms, curiosity grew. The question begged to be asked: Whose account were these people using?

As we thought, 45.62% of people share their sibling’s account followed by friends. Point to be noted here though is that only 8.19% share their accounts with their partners. Another interpretation of this data could be that a lot of people would be okay with sharing their account with their friends, family members and even their parents before they decide to share an account with their partner. That’s interesting!

Then we got on to asking the viewers if they would buy their own subscriptions if the time came. This is what more than half of them said.

A good 57.3% of people wouldn’t mind funding their own viewing experience but 42.67% is a high number of people who wouldn’t consider paying.

Finally, here’s a consensus of the people who are paying for their own subscriptions on the big OTT platforms out there.

Basically, little more than a third of the people we surveyed are paying for their own subscriptions on each platform, the least being on Disney+ Hotstar.

What does this data suggest? Should OTT platforms be rethinking their subscription models and/or maybe adding incentives, perks or changing the price range? Only time will tell.

(We got this information from a press release.)