While Indian government has set the growth target for media and entertainment (M&E) sector of over USD 100 billion by the year 2030, tech giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seeing Indian M&E industry as a major market for investment.
“M&E industry in India is one of the fastest growing among all. We are seeing rapid cloud adoption in all sectors but the adoption in M&E sector is immense. With Cinema, OTT and media growing like anything, there is no market like India today and the demand and headroom for growth is massive. We have recently partnered with NDTV. We have just the runway in India,” said Puneet Chandok, President of Commercial Business, AWS India and South Asia at Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL).
SonyLIV is the first Over the top (OTT) service in India born on the AWS Cloud. SonyLIV launched Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) interactive game show to allow viewers to submit answers to questions on the show in real time via their mobile devices. Similarly, Hotstar which is India's largest premium streaming platform, has been downloaded by more than 80 million users throughout the world too uses AWS platform.
AWS provides most purpose-built capabilities for media and entertainment of any cloud—targeting five mission-critical industry solution areas: Content Production; Media Supply Chain and Archive; Broadcast; Direct-to-Consumer and Streaming; and Data Science and Analytics. AWS simplifies how content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors use the cloud to build, deploy, and reinvent workloads across each area—making it easy to select the right tools and partners for their workloads, accelerate production launches, and see faster time to market.
“AWS also enables media and entertainment businesses to leverage the right cloud services that can help them innovate to address the growing user expectations. A core value proposition of cloud is that it has democratised the access to cutting edge technologies, making it accessible to media companies of all sizes, including the traditional broadcasters to innovate easily,” said Chandok.
“Today, there are cloud-based solutions that can be scaled appropriately to the size of a business’ operations, allowing businesses to innovate at low costs. AWS also helps OTT platforms to develop and bring solutions to market faster than before, enabling faster turnaround time for content and products, at lower costs. These platforms can quickly commission and de-commission experiments and projects at a greater frequency with access to AWS’s entire portfolio of cloud services,” he said.
The Union Secretary for Information and Broadcasting Apurva Chandra at the FICCI Frames Fast Track 2022 held in September had said that the media and entertainment industry to set a target of growing the industry to more than $100 billion by the year 2030. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting will do whatever it takes to support the M&E sector and help it grow, he had said.
A joint report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the India Media & Entertainment industry is estimated to be valued between USD 2729 billion in 2022 and is poised to grow to USD 5565 billion by 2030.
The report highlights the role of some media segments, particularly OTT platforms and said the sector has witnessed rapid changes fueled by "accelerated technological progress and evolving consumer behaviours".
The digital video and gaming segment is leading the "boom" with an over 40 per cent of total media consumption in 2022 backed by growth in internet and smartphone penetration, said the report.
The total growth of the India Media & Entertainment industry between 2020 and 2022 is expected to be around USD 6 billion and "2/3rd of the growth" would be "driven by digital", it added.The report also said that it will become critical for companies in the sector to understand the imperatives that will help them seize these opportunities and harness their true potential.
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