Thread by @jshilanjanm

Amazon's priming pursuit to buy @MXPlayer MX Player is a masterstroke! 🙌🙌

Here's why it wants a 3rd streaming platform. Let’s start from the start 👇

Basics:
🔰 MX was developed by Korea’s J2 Interactive to play downloaded videos on smartphones

🔰 By 2018, it had 175m MAU globally. In VC parlance, most users hailed from Bharat (not India)

🔰 Mostly android users from beyond Tier-1 & 2 cities, with less money, but more knack for entertainment

🔰 They would download pirated content & watch over MX

Enters, @TimesInternet:
🔰 Impressed by its penetration into Bharat, Times acquired it in 2018 for $140mn!

🔰 Relaunched as an AVOD-based app that allowed users to stream content for free with un-skippable ads (AVOD: Advertising-Video on Demand)

The Positioning:
🔰 Aware of the usual MX user, it focussed on stories primed with a mix of sex, violence & crime, set in Bharat, or having main characters who hail from there, either in the story or in reality

🔰 As this worked wonders with user & engagement growth, MX doubled down by listing similar content from other players

🔰 For eg- In 2020, it signed on one of India’s most prominent adult content OTT, Ullu

Outcome:
Today, MX Player has a MAU count of 300m+ 🚀🚀

But, unlike MX which went AVOD route, most of the well-known OTT powerhouses had grown as SVOD platforms till mid-2021. The ’S’ in SVOD stands for Subscriptions.

Then, Netflix, Disney, WarnerBros, Amazon Prime Video were all hit by a global slowdown in OTT subscriptions.

Thank recessionary pressures in their main markets & high inflation hitting the pockets globally.

But, it didn’t mean the users didn’t want entertainment anymore.

Thus happened, the pivot to AVOD:
🔰 @Disney has launched such packages on Hotstar, Hulu & more

🔰 @Netflix is already working on ad-supported models

🔰 And, @Amazon, launched miniTV in 2021!

Amazon launched miniTV smartly tucked inside the its website/app. Why?

🔰 No hassle to bring users to a fresh app/website

🔰 Would help bring new shoppers to its app/website in lieu of watching a show on miniTV

🔰 It already knew which user’s profile should be shown what ads- A new platform would be a problem here

🔰 It could tell advertisers precisely, how many users of what profile saw an ad, transacted, or not- No competitor can that

But there was one problem:
Amazon's un/under-penetrated state in Bharat (vs India) also limited miniTV’s reach & potential.

2 ways to solve this 👇

Difficult way- Build a 3rd platform with such content, promote it, acquire users over time, and grow it, like it grew Prime Videos, and is now growing miniTV.

Easy way- Buy an existing such platform that has already solved it all- Buy MX! ⚡⚡

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#Amazon #AmazonIndia #miniTV #MXPlayer #TimesInternet