Amazon Prime Video lines up 70 shows, films over 2 years

Amazon Prime Video will launch nearly 70 new series and films over the next two years in India, it said on Tuesday, as the streaming war intensifies in the domestic media and entertainment market.

Rivals Disney Star and Reliance-backed Viacom18 are merging to create a media giant that will have a 30% share of the over-the-top (OTT) market in India, a report by JustWatch, a streaming search engine said. Amazon Prime Video has a market share of 22%, while Netflix has a share of 13%, according to the report that tracks OTT platforms across markets.

Amazon will premiere 40 original series and movies, and 29 films that will stream on the platform post-theatrical release, across Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages between 2024 and 2025. Its original series includes Excel Entertainment’s ‘Andhera’; Varun Dhawan and Samantha Ruth Prabhu-starrer ‘Citadel: Honey Bunny’, the Indian adaptation of the American espionage thriller; Karan Johar-backed ‘Daring Partners’; Siddharth Roy Kapur’s ‘Matka King’ starring Vijay Varma; and ‘The Revolutionaries’, an adaptation of the book by the same name.

Mike Hopkins, global head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said India is a key geography for the OTT platform and that it will continue to invest in the market to simplify the service as well as engage viewers with compelling content. “As we look at the next 250 million subscribers that we’re going to acquire, they are definitely going to come from outside of the United States. And we’re not going to be able to achieve that unless we do a really good job for customers in India as well,” he said in a fireside chat with filmmaker Karan Johar on Tuesday when announcing the new line-up.

Hopkins also said Indian content was watched in over 210 countries and territories worldwide on Prime Video in 2023. Indian programming had trended in the top 10 on Prime Video worldwide for 43 out of the 52 weeks of the year, he said, as consumers lapped up Indian shows and films.

Globally, Amazon increased its content spends on music and video content by 14% year-on-year to $18.9 billion in calendar year 2023, according to a recent regulatory filing in the US. It is expected to keep the momentum going in calendar 2024 and beyond as media consolidation grows, experts tracking the OTT market said.

While Amazon Prime Video does not give a break-up of its content spends in India, industry experts peg the figure at around Rs 700-800 crore, which is an increase of over 30% versus last year when content spends were around Rs 500-550 crore.