Flipkart confirms video streaming plan; contemplates acquisition and partnership

With the penetration of Jio, video streaming market has become a booming segment in India. Realising the opportunity in the segment, global behemoths - Amazon Prime and Netflix had entered India in 2016. To get users hooked, they have also started generating original series for the local audience.

Despite rival Amazon interest in the segment, video streaming has been never a priority for Flipkart, however, that’s not the case anymore. The Walmart controlled company is willing to grab a slice of $500 million worth video streaming market which is slated to touch $5 billion by 2022.

According to the company’s CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Flipkart is weighing options including partnership and acquisitions to offer services in video streaming segment. Previously, it was in talks to buy a stake in Hotstar.

Although, Krishnamurthy has clarified that the company wouldn’t target to create a video streaming platform on its own. As per him, Flipkart customer base largely consists of 18-35 age bracket and such audience exhibits significant engagement with video content. This behaviour is triggering company to evangelise video streaming segment.

About six months ago, Flipkart partnered Hotstar to launch video advertising platform – Shopper Audience Network. The platform enables brands or marketers to place targeted advertisement through personalised video advertising on the country’s largest streaming site.

Currently, Netflix has 5-7 lakh subscribers in India while Amazon and Hotstar have 13 million and 5 million paid users respectively. Overall, Hotstar claims over 100 million monthly active users.

Besides the aforementioned companies, Alibaba has also been planning to launch OTT platform focusing on entertainment-centric short video space (less than 20 minutes). However, it appears that the plan went into stealth mode.

It’s worth noting that Flipkart had tried audio content segment with Flyte. Flyte used to offer Digital Right Management Free (DRM) free music catalogue in 2012. However, it pulled the plug from the service within a year.

While Flipkart’s plan for video streaming service looks very nascent and hazy at the moment, it would be interesting to see how Flipkart catches up with Amazon, Netflix, and others with its late entry into the segment.

The development was first reported by Bloomberg Quint.