Amid JioCinema’s aggressive content push, is it a bad time for Amazon Prime Video to hike prices?

At a time when Jio Studios, the content arm of Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries, has unveiled a huge slate of 100 new films and TV shows that will play on JioCinema app (a part of Viacom18, a subsidiary of TV18), one of the largest OTT (over-the-top) platforms in the country, Amazon Prime Video, has announced a price hike. Within just two years of hiking its Prime membership prices in India, the company has informed its customers that its monthly plan will now be priced at Rs 299 instead of Rs 179 earlier and the quarterly plan is now priced at Rs 599 as compared to Rs 459 earlier thus seeing a hike of Rs 120 and Rs 140 a for the monthly and quarterly plans, respectively. In contrast, Jio Cinema is free of cost at the moment.

The annual Prime Membership and the annual Prime Lite Membership prices remain the same at Rs 1,499 and Rs 999, respectively. While Amazon Prime membership includes a plethora of services like shopping benefits, free delivery, priority shipping, early access to sales, extra discounts, etc. in addition to access to services like Prime Videos, Prime Music, Prime Reading, Prime Gaming, Audible, and Kindle Unlimited, experts said that JioCinema’s aggressive march in the OTT content space is bound to have some impact on the industry. “JioCinema is looking to compete with its rivals such as Netflix and Amazon in a market that is becoming increasingly popular due to cheap data prices. However, Netflix is outperforming its competitors in the subscription video-on-demand market, commanding a 39% share by revenue in 2021, compared to nearest rival Hotstar's 23%,” Media Partners Asia said in a report.

“What we’re seeing is quite disruptive right now. Their decision to show IPL (their most expensive property) free of cost came as a shocker to the industry. Now Jio Cinema is not just about IPL. It’s about wanting to become No. 1 content platform,” said Karan Taurani, senior vice president and research analyst, Elara Capital.  

Jio Studios recently not only announced tiles like Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Dunki, Adil Hussain’s The Storyteller, and a number of originals in local languages like Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati and Bhojpuri to be made in genres ranging from action, drama, thriller and romance to horror and musicals, but it also has reportedly entered into a deal with Warner Bros Discovery to bring HBO content home, which was earlier available on Disney+Hotstar.

Hence, experts said, popular shows like Succession, Game of Thrones, and the even the upcoming Harry Potter series will give JioCinema much-needed leverage after the ongoing IPL cricket season is over and help it capture a larger piece of the Indian OTT industry pie.

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