Amazon MX Player announces new slate, to premiere films from Prime Video library for free, alongside originals

Amazon MX Player, the ad-supported video streaming platform created as a result of Amazon’s acquisition of the MX Player app and merged with its ad-supported video-on-demand service, Amazon miniTV, has announced a new slate of over 100 shows and movies to premiere this year. 

Further, the platform will stream films from the library of Prime Video, Amazon’s subscription-on-demand OTT platform, such as Pushpa: The Rise, Gehraiyaan and others, for free after the titles have remained behind a paywall for a certain period of time. The new entity is targeting over 250 million unique monthly active users. 

New and returning shows

While older fiction and non-fiction shows such as Aashram starring Bobby Deol, Hunter featuring Suniel Shetty and Jackie Shroff, Remo D’Souza and Malaika Arora’s Hip Hop India, Jamnapaar, Who’s Your Gynac, Campus Beats and Gutar Gu will see new seasons, the platform has also announced new titles such as Titan, Rise and Fall, and Bhay. 

While local language originals will primarily be in Hindi, these, along with all Korean, Turkish, and Mandarin shows from MX Vdesi, will also be dubbed in Tamil and Telugu. The app is available across Apple and Android devices, FireTV, Prime Video and the Amazon shopping app while forging other distribution partnerships. 

In October, Amazon announced its acquisition of select assets from Times Internet-owned MX Player, including the MX Player app, which it said would merge with its ad-supported video-on-demand service, Amazon miniTV, to create Amazon MX Player. Mint had earlier reported that the e-commerce giant had resumed talks to acquire the cash-strapped video streaming platform almost a year after the initial deal fell through. 

“We’re producing significantly more than we did last year. The media market, as a whole, has always seen a very large presence of free and paid content, it’s not one or the other. It’s a continuum of choice, and content from both sides will come together at an even larger scale than before,” Karan Bedi, head of Amazon MX Player, told Mint in an interview. 

Aruna Daryanani – director of Amazon MX Player, said while miniTV had scaled well on its own, the acquisition of MX Player was important to achieve fast inorganic growth. The entity that together targets 250 million unique active users monthly sees these customers spend between 40 minutes to two hours on the app per session. And, on the product side, the company’s technology bandwidth is focused on scaling the service in areas where data networks are patchy, given that ad-supported services need to penetrate mass-market viewers. 

“We are showcasing movies from the Prime Video catalogue and also bringing international shows dubbed in local languages per week,” Amogh Dusad – head of content, Amazon MX Player, said. The intention is to strengthen the offering across categories of programmes. “We now have huge scale, so it is incumbent upon us to ensure that our breadth and depth of content is substantive. The target audience of the platform is a 15-40 year age cohort, across town classes and life stages,” he added.

To be sure, bolstered by India’s economic expansion and rising consumption, the advertising market in India is expected to grow at a 9.4% CAGR to ₹1.58 trillion by 2028 from ₹1.01 trillion in 2023—1.4 times the global average, according to PwC India’s report, Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2024–28: India Perspective. 

Digital advertising will be the primary driver, with internet advertising projected to grow at a staggering 15.6% CAGR, reaching ₹85,000 crore by 2028, up from ₹41,000 crore in 2023. But, a large chunk of digital advertising in the country is dominated by foreign giants like Google and Facebook, leaving little room for others to grow. 

However, Girish Prabhu, head of Amazon Ads India, said the massive content and shopping choices allow Amazon MX Player to drive outcomes on brands as it continues to bring customers back over time. “It’s not important how many video ads were run, but whether the brand is growing and staying relevant. That is why advertising is important to Amazon,” Prabhu said.