Amazon, the company which is most famous for its e-commerce platform, is a force to be reckoned with, no matter what business one might be talking about. The company has a presence in every tech market on the planet, from cloud services, e-commerce, and weirdly, streaming. While the entire world knows Amazon’s Prime Video offering, the company is now turning over a new leaf and showing some extra love to users in India by announcing a free streaming service MiniTV.
MiniTV will allow Indian users to stream shows without any charge, and will work on the ad model. This is a first for streaming giants, as most competitors usually rely on subscriptions to sell content.
However, Amazon has always said that its streaming service is a way to attract more traffic to its main, e-commerce website, and this move will serve that purpose. Moreover, if you are as big as Amazon, chances are that spending money on customer acquisition is not a massive inconvenience.
The platform will have a heavy emphasis on India based shows, and will include catalogue from TVF and Pocket Aces-two of India’s most beloved web studio creators. That’s not all, as Amazon has also said that the platform will have web-series, comedy shows, and content around tech news, food, beauty, fashion “to begin with.”
It will also feature content from Indian comedians like Ashish Chanchlani, Amit Bhadana, Round2Hell, Harsh Beniwal, Shruti Arjun Anand, Elvish Yadav, Prajakta Koli, Swagger Sharma, Aakash Gupta and Nishant Tanwar.
However, this platform will not compete with Amazon Prime, and will thus, feature mostly old content.
“Viewers will be informed on latest products and trends by tech expert Trakin Tech, fashion and beauty experts such as Sejal Kumar, Malvika Sitlani, Jovita George, Prerna Chhabra and ShivShakti. Food lovers can enjoy content from Kabita’s Kitchen, Cook with Nisha, and Gobble. In the coming months, MiniTV will add many more new and exclusive videos,” the company added.
This comes at a time when streaming is at an all time high, owing to the second wave of COVID 19 which has led to lockdowns being reinforced in a major part of the country. Amazon’s move can pay dividends in the long run, as a large ratio of Indians still feels hesitant towards paying for online services (including streaming). Thus, MiniTV has a chance to woo the customers that did not want to pay for an Amazon Prime subscription, and lead to more revenue for Amazon’s e-commerce website in the future.
