A Study on Increase in the Usage of OTT Streaming Services

Abstract

OTT Platforms have been becoming more and more popular in India due to locally-oriented content, low costs, and the widespread use of 4G (and 5G in the future), and are predicted to grow even more. Streaming Services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hotstar dominate the market, with others such as AltBalaji and Voot also becoming more popular. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of active subscribers to these OTT streaming platforms has increased by almost 6 million users in a single year. This study surveys a sample population of 200 respondents and aims to ascertain whether their usage of OTT platforms has increased or not, by how much time, and the perceived reasons behind this increase. The study found that the subscribers of these OTT platforms had increased their usage by almost 3 hours on a daily average due to the pandemic, citing various reasons such as ‘Boredom’, ‘Excess time’, ‘New content’ etc. This increase in usage is very encouraging for the new players in the market to launch their streaming services and foreign OTT platforms looking to launch in India (for ex. Hulu and HBO Max). It means that there is a demand for such services in India.