Amazon Prime Video India has joined up with Bharti Airtel, an Indian telecommunications service, to launch a mobile-only plan of its service called Prime Video Mobile Edition.
What Is Amazon Prime Video Mobile Edition?
Prime Video Mobile Edition is a new plan for Amazon Prime Video available from January 13, 2021. It's exclusive to Airtel pre-paid customers in India.
The plan is free for the first 30 days and is then charged at INR89/month ($1.21). It's aggressive pricing, but one that aims to take advantage of a country with a huge mobile phone-using population, and the existing customer base of Airtel.
Airtel is the second-largest phone carrier in India, with 326 million subscribers, which accounts for a 28% market share. The leader is Reliance Jio, which has 404 million subscribers, which is a 35% market share.
The introductory bundle priced at INR89 comes with Prime Video Mobile Edition for 28 days and 6GB of data.
There are other tiers and bolt-on options for those who want more Prime benefits and more data. As reported by Variety, those are:
- INR299 ($4.09) buys Prime Video Mobile Edition, unlimited calling, and 1.5GB per day.
- INR131 ($1.17) buys Amazon Prime membership for 30 days, with full Prime Video access, free shipping, and ad-free music.
- INR349 ($4.77) buys Amazon Prime membership for 28 days, with free shipping, ad-free music, unlimited calling, and 2GB per day.
India is the first country that Amazon is rolling this out for, though you can expect to see it in other countries if it's successful.
Indeed, this isn't a new concept, as competitor Netflix launched its own INR199 ($2.72) mobile plan monthly subscription in India in 2019. It then rolled out to the Philippines and Thailand in 2020.
Disney+ Hotstar also has similar partnerships in place. It's one of the main ways that streaming services in India connect with customers.
In a statement, Jay Marine, Vice President of Amazon Prime Video worldwide, said:
India is one of our fastest-growing territories in the world with very high engagement rates. Buoyed by this response, we want to double down by offering our much-loved entertainment content to an even larger base of Indian customers. Given high mobile broadband penetration in the country, the mobile phone has become one of the most widely used streaming devices.
Goldman Sachs recently reported that the gaming and video streaming market could reach $5 billion gross value transactions by March 2025, so it's clearly a lucrative market to take hold of.