Amazon MX Player to focus on delivering new content to India’s audience in 2025

 Dusad: In the miniTV journey, we have created some franchises and characters that get a lot of consumer attraction, we will continue to give returning seasons of that like Gutar Gu, Campus Beats, Heartbeats. We will also program the wider appealing shows like Ashram, Hunter. The beauty of digital is we can optimize for both audiences: the one from miniTV and what we inherited from MX.

 Dusad: We are working on a new category called MX Fatafat which provides 2-minute vertical scrolling scripted dramas. The episode is like a long show series episodes running for only two minutes for consumers who don’t have time to binge watch long shows. We got a very positive response from creators on this because it’s a new creative challenge for storytellers, screenplay writers, actors, technicians. There is lot of excitement because the creative fraternity also wants to look for what is the next new thing and what can we do.  

 We closed the transaction in September 2024. That we were able to invite everyone for the content slate event in January is a testament how quickly the team has integrated the two platforms. So, it is all now backend-integrated into the same platform. Obviously because the miniTV app still has some customers that were there from the erstwhile promotions, there’s some transition left. Over time it will all be Amazon MX player, one brand, one service and that will be available not only on Play Store apps but also on all Connected TV apps as well.

 Dusad: Almost all of our shows are localized in Tamil, Telugu language. A big part of our catalog are shows that come in Korean, Mandarin, Turkish language which get localized in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. The 2025 priority is about strengthening our connect with the Hindi-speaking audience. We will continue to evaluate regional as an area of further growth as and when we take stock of how the business is doing and what are the other growth area opportunities.

 Bedi: We have 250 million monthly unique actors and a very diverse audience across geographies, genders, age-groups, income-groups. So, the first goal is to provide a diversity of content for the diverse audience, through a diverse set of brands and advertisers and then use the Amazon signals to ensure that it is relevant for them. Reach plus relevance equals results, that’s the goal for 2025 is to roll this out in scale.  

 Bedi: Around 50 per cent of our audience is Tier 1-3 cities. We are very deeply penetrated into every part of the geography, whatever the tiering.

Bedi: We are rolling out a generative AI tool that will allow brands to create advertisements that then can be put on to Amazon MX and other services in an automated AI manner.

Prabhu: We are working on bringing Gen AI to advertisers to help better leverage Amazon Signals. Advertisers can state their objective and products and we can then make recommendation as per their needs and that can lead into campaigns and other outcomes.

Daryanani: Users can also shop in between ads on the platform. You don’t watch an ad with the same intensity that you watch a show. You get a bit distracted and switch off. So now when the ad is playing, the landing page on the Amazon site will open up below the video and you can just browse through it. And this is within that same interface, we are not taking customers out, unlike other video services that take you to some random page outside and break the experience. We’re also bringing in immersive ads.

 Bedi: When you think about some other services and the originals, there is a particular segment that they are targeted to but the content that we program for is targeted at the diversity that this country has. We brought everything from young college romance set in Indore to action drama set in Agarpur to you know corporate drama set in Mumbai. So, that is what we stand for, this diversity of content for the diversity that India brings.