“80% OTT content consumption happens on mobile”: Prakash Sikaria, VP, Flipkart

Flipkart’s vice president of growth and monetisation - Prakash Sikaria discusses advertising, OTT audiences and snackable video consumption.

Flipkart Video is Flipkart’s in-app streaming service, offering over 5000 shows, movies and short film titles in a variety of languages including Hindi, English and several regional languages. The technology behind the service ensures that buffering time is kept to a minimum.

The latest addition to the Flipkart Video library is Zindagi inShort. Zindagi inShort, is a collection of seven bitter-sweet, ‘slice of life’ short films. These films touch upon themes such as standing up for yourself when it’s the hardest, online romance, the innocence of childhood, the confusion of old age, the construct of being loved in a marriage, infidelity and a woman’s role in the family.

Zindagi inShort is now streaming live and can be viewed only on the Flipkart app. under the video section, for free. On the side-lines of the press conference, we caught up with Prakash Sikaria, vice-president (growth and monetisation) at Flipkart.

Edited excerpts of the conversation below...

It’s clear that we’re seeing snackable behaviour when it comes to content consumption, and this is on a mobile only basis. They’re not starting the show on mobile and then shifting to the larger screen – the behaviour is to watch as and when they have a few free minutes.

Another lens through which we view OTT viewership is that there is that there are maybe 2-3 million people who are okay paying for content. But, there is a large audience in India that has grown up believing that digital content needs to be free and that’s why they’re pivoting more on platforms that are free.

That’s why you see a lot of freemium models on platforms like Hotstar. They have phenomenal numbers when it comes to free content but the paid portion is still a very small part of their site. These are some of the key differences in content consumption patterns.

Think of a typical 25 year old male from a Tier II or Tier III city, who has a 9 to 5 job or owns a business – these guys are spending about half an hour daily, watching content. The two choicest platforms for them are YouTube and TikTok because no other platform is free.

The content choices are moving away from television and soap operas to snackable content in genres such as news and comedy. TikTok has become a genre in itself, but that’s a conversation for another day…

It’s not like these guys don’t have content choices, but other OTT players are releasing episodic content which is nearly 40-45 minutes long and it’s not optimised for mobile.

So it’s not like they don’t have options – it’s just that YouTube and TikTok offer them quality snackable content for free. That’s the opportunity to double down on. There’s a universe between OTT and free platforms like YouTube and TikTok and it’s a very interesting space that so far, no one is going after…

We’re also working on bringing interactive content to the platform. If you look at TikTok, you don’t just see storytelling on the platform, you see people experimenting with interactive content and the mobile screen lends itself beautifully to that.

But if you look at OTT consumption, 90 per cent of it is merchandising and advertising based, not search based. If a consumer sees a banner ad for content, he’s more likely to click and watch.

I believe that while the YouTubes and Facebooks of the world will continue to get advertising dollars, standalone media platforms driven by content, will cap out after a point when it comes to advertising dollars, because they struggle to show the efficacy of the ad and its targeting etc. Because they don’t have any audience insights.

In that sense, we’re seeing videos turn into a great enabler. Our video player is very assisted. The first step is to onboard the consumer before they get into deeper flows like transactions or e-commerce on the app.