In a somewhat fitting portrait of the Indian digital subscription ecosystem, streaming platform Eros Now has partnered with the grocery delivery service Grofers. Customers who subscribe to Grofers’s Smart Bachat Club membership program will get access to Eros Now’s library as an add-on. Eros Now’s premium plan costs about twice that much of the subscription to Grofers membership program for the same period. However, it’s unclear if Grofers users will get the same perks as a Premium Eros Now subscriber.

Eros Now has also partnered with Gold’s Gym, bundling streaming subscriptions with fitness aspirations.

How Eros Now makes money

Though Eros Now sells subscriptions standalone like Netflix does, it is very likely that direct subscribers are a very small portion of its declared subscriber count. The company claimed this month in an earnings release that it had over 10 million subscribers. It plans to have 16 million by the end of fiscal 2019. Most of these subscribers come from partnerships that Eros Now has with telecom operators, aggregator platforms and hardware manufacturers. And now, a grocery app has joined the mix. The company has also started advertising to registered users (who are over ten times in number to ‘paying’ subscribers).

The company does not disclose ARPU for its ten million subscribers, though it’s likely to be far below the pricing for direct subscriptions. A ‘subscription’ to Eros Now is loosely enough defined that it’s possible for users to receive it as an add-on from things like new TVs and telecom subscriptions without paying anything more.

Eros Now deals

Aside from deals with Gold’s Gym and Grofers, Eros Now has announced these deals:

  • Marketing partnerships with Nature’s Basket, Voonik and Paytm.
  • A partnership with InMobi to enable brands to advertise through Eros Now.
  • A telco partnership with Sri Lanka’s Dialog Axiata, to provide its content through the Dialog ViU app.
  • Creating Eros Now Betz with Dab Gaming Ltd, where users get points for correctly predicting sports outcomes.

This is all aside from Eros Now’s telco partnerships which the service has signed with nearly every operator in India. Not all Indian streaming services are entirely satisfied with telco deals as a revenue source, though. Zee Entertainment’s Zee5 app recently pulled out of a partnership with Jio because the Reliance-owned telco was not providing rich consumer analytics that Zee wanted. It then went on to sign a partnership with Airtel.