Amazon Prime Video and Netflix are some of the oldest players in the streaming game in the Indian market, and while Netflix has been able to maintain its dominance in this foreign land as well, Prime Video has fallen off in face of new competition. The newly launched Disney’s Hotstar and Times Internet’s MX Player have higher reach than Amazon Prime Video, which caps out at 55 million monthly users in the country. Now, to compete better with all these streaming platforms, Amazon is launching a bundling option that will allow users to access subscribe to eight streaming services, dubbed ‘Prime Video Channels’.
The package will include Discovery+, Mubi, Hoichoi, DocuBay, ErosNow, Lionsgate Play, manoramaMax, and ShortsTV, all from a single interface.
Prime Video Channels will allow users to access content from all of these streaming companies at one place. This means that now, users who want to watch Discovery+ can just buy the subscription at Prime Video Channels and watch it directly on the app-no need to install a different Discovery+ app and remembering its login details.
Users will be able to choose what subscriptions they want to avail, and pay for just those services. The prices are as follows: DocuBay at ₹499/year, Eros Now at ₹299/ year, Hoichoi at ₹599/year, Lionsgate play at ₹699/year, manoramaMAX at ₹699/year, MUBI subscription at ₹1999/year, Shorts TV at ₹299/year, Discovery+ at ₹299/year.
“With the launch of Prime Video Channels, we now take the next big step in our journey to entertain India by creating a video entertainment marketplace first of its kind in India which will not only delight our customers by giving them even more entertainment choices, but also benefit the OTT Channel partners who collaborate with us to leverage Prime Video’s distribution, reach and tech infrastructure,” said Gaurav Gandhi, Country Manager, Amazon Prime Video, India.
While this move is aimed at improving the popularity of Amazon Prime Video in the country, it will also benefit these third party services massively, since they have been struggling to even break into the millions as far as average monthly users are concerned. With the backing of Amazon, as well as the ease of being able to access all this content from a single place, we might finally see people subscribing to Discovery+.
