OTT Rollercoaster in 2024: From SVOD Decline to Ad Pause Challenges

The 2024 year indeed was eventful for the OTT industry in India, with many changes in viewing behavior, with the evolution of new monetisation strategies, and the birth of a government-supported platform. Let's hit the rewind button and take a closer look.

Decline in SVOD

While subscription video-on-demand platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ Hotstar would create diverging sensations with much content, the advertising-supported video-on-demand side proved it had much more potential and transformed the contours of the OTT landscape.

A recent Ormax report released in August of this year states that India's digital video audiences number about 547.3 million, of which 28 percent belong to the SVOD universe while the remaining 72 percent belong to the AVOD universe. SVOD audiences have been declining by 2  percent from 153.0 million in 2023 to 150.6 million in 2024. This implies that people are becoming increasingly averse to paying carry OTT subscriptions as apparent in the fall of paid subscriptions from a whopping total of 101.8 million to 99.6 million.

In addition, OTT original consumption reached a plateau. In 2023, an average SVOD subscriber consumed around 12.3 original titles, however, by the first half of 2024, this has dropped to 10.2, reflecting a 17 percent fall compared to the previous year concerning original content viewership. Another report published in September 2024 indicated.

Emergence of pause ads

During this period, the OTT platforms resorted to different business models owing to decreased subscribers and increased churn rate. One key innovation was the introduction of pause ads. Disney+ Hotstar launched this breakthrough on its Connected TV feed in 2024, allowing advertisers to display ads to viewers when they pause content on CTV.

Such an unobtrusive format comes to stimulate brand engagement when users are actively multi-tasking across the platform. Zee5 and YouTube India soon followed the ways of pausing later on in the year.

Launch of Waves

Waves marks the debut of Prasar Bharati, India’s public broadcaster, in the OTT arena. This platform has a rich offering of live channels, movies, TV shows, and on-demand stuff to satisfy the interests of various viewers.

At present, Waves provides around 40 live channels, including popular channels among others like B4U, ABZY, SAB Group, 9X Media. They also include news channels such as India Today, News Nation, Republic, ABP News, News24, NDTV India, and channels from Doordarshan and Akashvani.

More than live streaming, Waves presents a wide array of on-demand content comprising films such as, Aarakshan, One Day, The Impossible as well as Alice Darling. The platform equally consists of TV shows, games, and a particular section for live events to make the whole viewing experience worthwhile.

Content regulation

Even the Indian government became serious in 2024 over the issue of regulating OTT content for all these developments. India's OTT ecosystem could have changed in 2024 with varying audience preferences and different business strategies across the board. The boom of AVOD, the introduction of new formats such as pause ads, and the combined entry of government-backed platforms like Waves into the system keep adapting in an ever-changing environment. The picture is incomplete, though, as some problems, like the decline in SVOD subscriptions, indicate that the path ahead remains going to be complicated and dynamic.