"We treat each piece of content like a product": Karan Bedi, MX Player

Launching a streaming service on a platform that already has 275 million monthly active users is an unusual proposition. But that’s what MX Player, originally a video player – an app which can play any kind of external video file – did when it entered the content streaming game, in February this year, 18 months after Times Internet acquired it from Korean tech firm J2 Interactive for around Rs 1,000 crore.

While its rival streaming platforms are investing in customer acquisition, MX Player’s challenge is conversion; if the team gets all its existing users to watch content on the platform, it would be among the top two platforms in the country, alongside Hotstar, ZEE5, SonyLIV, among many others.

Also Read: Why did Times Internet pay Rs 1,000 crore for MX Player?

Earlier this month, MX Player raised $110 million (around Rs 800 crore) led by Tencent and Times Internet; the plan is to pump it into content, marketing and in the expansion of the platform’s entertainment horizons. We spoke to Karan Bedi, CEO, MX Player, on the occasion. Bedi, former COO of Eros Now, a subscription lead video on demand platform, joined MX Player in October 2017. The team is over 300 employees strong.

MX Player boasts of a repository of 200,000 hours of content spread across TV and films. MX has inked content-sharing partnerships with TVF, Arre, Viacom, SunNXT, SonyLIV amongst others. Presently, 15 of its Originals are streaming on the platform.

Edited Excerpts:

Editor's note:

Though relatively new in the larger scheme of entertainment, algorithm based content consumption has been around long enough for ‘pro’ and ‘against' camps to have developed. The latter, which I belong to, is based on a simple premise – if recommendation engines keep pushing content of the kind we’ve already watched, how will we ever discover new, contrarian types of content? Where’s the serendipity and human folly in a world in which humans have less volition than a platform? I’ve disabled YouTube’s auto-play option, in a bid to take back some of the agency I feel a sense of having lost to it. Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings told interviewer Chris Anderson on the TED stage, “... in practice, you’re right, you can’t just rely on algorithms – it’s a mix of judgment and what we carry... there is no perfect tool...”

This is relevant in the context of the cover story this issue – an interview with Karan Bedi, CEO, MX Player – because, while he spoke about the ‘productisation’ of content, highlighted his focus beyond tier I cities, and deconstructed what ‘premium’ means (it’s not just about whether the content is available for a price versus free, but also about how much it costs to produce it!), the discussion got passionate around the subject of the big bad algo.

Karan defended recommendation engines, insisting they kick in when a sliver of a trend in human behaviour is evident among a certain demographic, and then – and this is the main part – help the producers discover niche audiences for that content. Conversely, algos help people find content they did not know exists... and are likely to enjoy. “Blowing up trends” caught by the engine, he insists, helps both consumers and producers. On MX Player, it turns out, dubbed Turkish content works surprisingly well in Punjab!

A voracious reader of Turkish writers Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, I cannot begin to surmise why that may be.

Ashwini Gangal, Executive Editor