According to a report by media consulting firm Ormax, India’s universe of digital video viewers may be 353.2 million, but only 31% of it is paying, while the rest (69%) are AVOD (advertising video-on-demand) are spectators.
Titled Ormax OTT Audience Report: 2022, the findings are based on research conducted on over 6,000 SVOD and AVOD audiences in urban India between November 2021 and March 2022. Viewer groups are profiled on various aspects of their digital video consumption, such as viewing behavior, languages, format and genre preference, subscription drivers and constraints, media habits, and more.
The presence of dubbing and subtitling options has enabled viewers to watch content in multiple languages, especially on the SVOD (Subscription Video-on-Demand) platform, the report said. An Indian SVOD viewer sees content in 4.6 languages on an average. A major part of the audience consuming content in the four South Indian languages comes from outside their native state. For example, 88% of Malayalam content viewers are from outside Kerala, while 82% of Tamil content viewers are from outside Tamil Nadu. The report noted that the AVOD approach on language content is more conservative, primarily due to the low presence of multi-language dubbing on AVOD services, including YouTube.
Dubbing has also fueled the development of English and other foreign language material, including Korean. In urban India, 65% of SVOD viewers and 43% of AVOD viewers watch English language content, although a large section (more than half) of them prefer to watch it in Indian language through dubbing. The average number of languages of content consumption among SVOD audiences is higher in the southern states, with Karnataka leading the way with an average of 5.7 languages. Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh rank lowest in this measure, with an average of less than four languages.
“Streaming is a rapidly growing category in India, and therefore, it is important for content creators and marketers to continuously upgrade their understanding of viewers, their tastes, their viewing habits and their viewing triggers,” said Shailesh Kapoor, Founder and CEO, Ormax Media said in a statement. Kapoor said, “Today there is a lot of AVOD content being created with SVOD lenses in India, but the formats and genres preferred by the two audience segments are quite different from each other. India has come in a big way recently, greenlighting a lot of content in this category has happened spontaneously so far, without any robust consumer data to aid the decision-making process,” said Kapoor.