There has been an increase in consumer power these days. Particularly in the technology industries the consumers have become more and more demanding owing to various factors. The primary factor being the increase in number of screens owned by consumers. According to Sanjay Gupta , MD of Star India, the number of screens available to customers were only 200 million till two or three years back. However, today the content in getting consumed through over 600 million screens. Now content is consumed more in individual screens than shared screens. This has increased the quantity of content needed and variety of content. Irrespective of the rural and urban divide same is the situation. The diversity of the rural consumers adds to one additional problem; relating to the language of the content.
The main strategy followed by content providers over the last few years was focussed on movies. However, the number of movies is still limited, and not in supply to meet the increasing amount of time spend in these screens. Some content providers tend to solve this issue by including content dubbed from other languages. Many providers have also started making their own content. Still, we think the content worries for these providers are not going to end soon.
Adding to the problem, is the increase in reviewing platforms for these contents. Now they need to focus on content which is focussed on meeting the preference of the individual consumers. They also need to have content which will be reviewed positively by a broader group of customers positively. Otherwise, this content which was intended for a particular segment will not be viewed by even those people from that segment owing to lower review and rating.
Data prices have fallen a lot in the last two years. This has caused two problems for the content providers. One, using these increased data people have started watching high multi-media quality content. Now, they will not find the older content in lower quality to be satisfying owing higher expectation. Therefore, most of the older content in lower quality do not serve the purpose to meet consumers increasing demand. Second, most of the increased data consumption is through mobile networks. Mobile networks still are not able to provide consistent quality data connectivity throughout. This influences the quality of viewing experience even if the content is of high quality.