MUMBAI: The trend of local and global media-cum-entertainment companies gaining rights for strong entertainment and sports properties in the online video industry is encouraging advertisers to think long-term to invest in them, The Hindu BusinessLine Reports.
“With mobile data getting cheaper and video consumption shooting up, brands have been quick to latch onto storytelling through digital videos,” Saurabh Mathur, Head of Strategy and Planning, VML India was quoted as saying to the newspaper.
Media Partners Asia, a research and consulting firm predicted that YouTube and Facebook on aggregate will account for 75 per cent of online video advertising in the Asia-Pacific region by December 2018.
The research agency also estimated that market players such as Amazon and Netflix in combination will have 35% of market share in subscription-based online videos this year.
Media Partners Asia’s Executive Director, Vivek Couto reportedly said: “The growth of subscription and ad-supported video services from Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Google is set to propel these companies to a combined 63 per cent share of Asia-Pacific online video revenues (ex-China) by the end of 2018.”
When it comes to sport, ESPN has claimed that its digital video consumption has increased by 79 per cent in 2017 itself, attracting 85 million sports fans tend daily. 28 million of them tune into ESPN through desktops, mobiles, and OTT.
The IPL 2018 rights going to Star India worked out the best not just for TV, but also for its OTT platform, Hotstar. By the end of the competition, concluded IPL, the total audience reach for the website and app on aggregate reached upto 202 million out of the 769 million across screens in the country.
However, despite this boom, there will be some challenges that advertisers will continue to face.
“This January, Mark Zuckerberg announced a big change in the Facebook algorithm. In an effort to improve user experience, Facebook decided to pull back content by brands. An analysis by video creation platform Wochit showed that views on Facebook declined by 15 per cent. This change in the algorithm is sure to make advertisers think,” Mathur opined.
Guneet Singh, Head-Marketing Solutions, Google India had said at a recent event that most of the company’s work is now on video platforms “and the reason is 80 per cent of consumers are on mobile”.
