Post on Medial

Amazon buying 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. But, 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, Times Internet: -> 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, most of the well-known OTT powerhouses had grown as SVOD platforms till mid-2021. The ’S’ in SVOD stands for Subscriptions. Thank recessionary pressures & high inflation hitting the West- Netflix, Disney, WarnerBros, Amazon Prime Video were all hit by a global slowdown in OTT subscriptions. However, it didn’t mean the users didn’t want entertainment anymore. .. Thus happened the pivot to AVOD: Netflix, and also Disney launched such packages on Disney+ Hotstar, Hulu & more And in line with the trend, 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! ⚡⚡ What do you think?