Much has changed in the last year or so in the digital content business in India: with the entry of Amazon Prime, Netflix, the push from media house backed players like Star India (HotStar) and Sony (Sony Liv), apart from several other platforms, the game has changed. This, from a time when YouTube was the primary game in town, and the content providers and aggregators had little choice but to play the ad-supported game. Suffice to say that the content owners and aggregators have never had it better, but in a winner-takes all market that is the Internet, what happens when the dependency increases? At the IAMAI India Digital Summit, I referenced what someone from the books publishing industry once told me about the pre-Amazon days of e-commerce in India: at first, book publishers had been ecstatic with the growth of Flipkart, because it gave them an additional, and a massive source of revenue. Then as the catalog grew, buying shifted online, and many offline stores shut, the dependency led to a squeezing of publisher margins. The power that platforms have is also evidenced by Amazon's bullying of Hachette a few years ago, because Amazon then accounted for over 50% of all books sales in the United States, and over 60% of all e-books. So can this happen in the media business, where large catalogs and original content from platforms will increase dependency and reduce negotiating ability for content owners? "It's a partnership, and you have to approach it in that manner",…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...