A look at India's booming video streaming market, fueled by Reliance Jio's cheap data, as companies like Flipkart and delivery service Zomato invest in content
Stephanie Findlay / Financial Times : Tweets: @financialtimes , @raju , and @sjfindlay See also Mediagazer Tweets: @financialtimes : India's video streaming market is growing so quickly that Amazon and Netflix aren't the only players: food delivery unicorn Zomato, Walmart-owned ecommerce firm Flipkart and others are competing to win subscribers https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/... Raju Narisetti / @raju : With @Disney (Star) and @Netflix and @Amazon, India will offer its own version of streaming wars in 2020: How the streaming wars came to India https://www.ft.com/... via @financialtimes Stephanie Findlay / @sjfindlay : Bollywood is in overdrive as tech titans splurge on original content to win India's streaming wars, my @FT story here https://www.ft.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
India's online video market was already large before this story: an earlier FT look put it at $700M+ with 245M monthly mobile YouTube viewers, and WSJ reporting showed users consuming 40+ hours of video per month off cheap data plans. What changed with this piece is who is chasing those eyeballs — Walmart-owned Flipkart and food-delivery unicorn Zomato are funding original content alongside Netflix, Amazon and Disney (Star), turning a media market into a cross-industry one.
The common enabler across all of them is Reliance Jio, whose inexpensive data plans created the audience everyone is now bidding for. The stakes show up later in the corpus: by 2021, US giants were still struggling to convert Indian viewers into payers, which makes the entry of deep-pocketed non-media players the pivotal development.
First-order effects
- Zomato and Flipkart are redirecting capital from their core delivery and commerce businesses into original content, using video as an engagement and retention tool rather than a standalone profit line.
- Netflix, Amazon and Disney (Star) suddenly compete for Indian attention not just with each other but with apps users already open daily for shopping and food orders.
Second-order effects
- Content funded by commerce and delivery margins puts downward pressure on subscription pricing — rivals whose only revenue is viewer fees must match 'free with your order' economics or cede volume.
- Reliance Jio gains leverage as the gatekeeper: whoever controls cheap data distribution shapes which services reach hundreds of millions of mobile-first viewers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, India's streaming market consolidates around conglomerates that subsidize content with adjacent revenue — telecom, commerce, sports — leaving pure-play subscription models structurally disadvantaged, consistent with later reporting on Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema winning via sports and affordable pricing (their strategy against Netflix and Prime Video).
- The gap between audience size and paying subscribers becomes the defining constraint: US platforms' difficulty cashing in on India (amid content outcries and unwillingness to pay) suggests regulation and payment behavior, not demand, will cap how the market matures.
The trend: India's streaming wars are being won by companies that can bundle or subsidize video with other businesses, forcing pure-play subscription streamers to rethink pricing in emerging markets.