Telecom Firms Choose OTT Platforms to Attract Customer Base

By siliconindia  |  Friday, 25 September 2020, 04:44:41 PM IST

Telecom Firms Choose OTT Platforms to Attract Customer Base
The telecom carriers are providing incentives like subscriptions to their customers on services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix to attract the customer base. This initiative is taken after the announcement of the first tariff increase in the three years in 2019. 
As the theaters in India are closed due to the pandemic restrictions, the demand for entertainment content has raised on the online platform. Theaters is one of the massive film markets across the globe based on the number of tickets sold. However, there are numerous high- budget regional films have been released on these online platforms this year. 
India's one of the biggest telecom companies, Reliance Jio Infocomm has launched a new plan for its customers who prefer monthly billing over the pay-as-you-go-packs. This plan would cost 399, it would offer 75 gigabytes of data, along with the access to Netflix on a mobile device and a one-year subscription to two OTT applications and also access to Jio's movie and songs library.
According to Jefferies India's report, “Reliance Jio’s new postpaid plans offer more content and come at a 20 percent discount.”  However, Bharati Airtel's entry-level plan is priced at 499. Airtel offers the same data limit but doesn't give access to Netflix and Disney+Hotstar. On the other hand, Vodafone Idea's plan gives 40 GB data and doesn't offer access to any of the online platforms. 
The report further states that over the past four years, the number of users choosing monthly billing of mobile services has reduced sharply. Such users now form about five percent of the total 1.14 billion subscribers and they generate about 15 percent of the sector’s revenue.
“This time extremely aggressive content offerings could be the key attraction for consumers,” says, Naval Seth and Sonali Shah, analysts,  Emkay Global Financial Services.
The analysts predict that the Bharti and Vodafone Idea would follow Jio and collaborate with OTT platforms to retain their monthly bill-paying customers whose average monthly spending is higher than the prepaid users.
After Jio announced the enhanced postpaid plans, Bharti Airtel has lost about nine percent, while Vodafone Idea has fallen 12.7 percent in two sessions

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