Rajan Anandan, Google’s India chief made an interesting revelation today in an interview with Hindustan Times – He said “Today we have 10,000 full-length Indian movies on YouTube and 95% of India’s music catalogue both in Hindi as well as regional is available on YouTube.”
That is a big number and probably the biggest catalogue of Indian movies available anywhere on a single platform. Over last few years, number of online platforms have come up who stream Indian movies online, either free or on a fix fee subscription model.
We decided to find out how these dedicated platforms compare with YouTube and we came across some interesting numbers. we compared Times Internet backed BoxTV.com, BigFlix.com and Yahoo movieplex with YouTube.
Here are approximate numbers we could come up with!
While Youtube has over 10,000, BoxTv also seems to have good number of movies on their catalogue. While BoxTv does not mention anywhere the number of movies they have, we used some specific search strings in Google search that only show up on actual full movie pages.
The search results showed that BoxTv has over 7500 full length movies, which is not bad for a platform that has been recently launched. BigFlix has over 2000+ full length movie available on their platform according to their website. While Yahoo Movieplex hardly had any Hindi movies, I am not too sure if they are serious about it.
Please keep in mind that most of YouTube movies are completely free of cost, whereas on BoxTv and Bigflix, they are available on subscription model.
Rajan Anandan, in the interview shared some other numbers that are quite mind-boggling as well. YouTube has gone from 15 million unique users in 2011 to 55 million unique users a month in 2013. Apart from 10,000 full length Indian movies, they have 95% of India’s music catalogue both in Hindi as well as in regional languages.
YouTube also has India’s top six TV networks which upload full TV shows 3 hours after they have beamed on TV. YouTube’s web-only video content in India is growing at a a phenomenal 300% year-on-year.
One thing is clear, YouTube is progressing to become a near monopoly in Indian web video content market (if it is already not) and it will be nearly impossible for any one else to even come remotely close to them in near future.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this!
