Amazon Prime Increases Subscription Prices In India, Monthly Plan To Cost More Than Netflix

Amazon has hiked the price of Prime membership in India. With this price hike, the membership of Amazon Prime is going to cost an individual, more than that of Netflix. 

Earlier, the monthly subscription price of Amazon Prime was INR 179 per month, which has been hiked by more than INR 100 with the current price being at INR 299. Though the quarterly plan has also been hiked to INR 599 from INR 459, the annual plan, which is INR 1,499 remains unchanged. Further, the Amazon Prime Lite membership costs also remain unchanged which is INR 999 per month.

Comparing this with Netflix, the monthly subscription price for the platform is divided into various slabs that start from INR 149 per month, which is for streaming on mobile phones and tablets. For single device HD streaming, the price is INR 199 per month, and the standard plan costs a user INR 499 per month and the premium one with 4K+HDR resolution, costs INR 649 per month, both of which can be streamed on all devices. 

Amazon Prime is now at par with Disney+Hotstar, which is another global competitor of both Amazon and Netflix. The premium monthly subscription price of Hostar is INR 299 while the annual subscription costs INR 1,499 to a user. But the price for a subscription under the Super category that allows two devices to log in is INR 899 for the platform.

However, with the Amazon Prime membership, a user gets to access benefits more than just video streaming. With this membership, a user gets free and faster delivery of products ordered on Amazon, access to Prime Music, early notifications of offers and sales on Amazon, better offers, and many more.

Exactly a year back, Amazon Prime, launched its movie rental service in India. It announced that this service will enable early rental access to the latest Indian and international movies. Additionally, it will also offer a catalogue of popular movies from around the world on a transactional (per-movie) basis. 

In addition, Amazon also announced that it was planning to increase investment in the country and revealed 40 titles of series and movies in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu, which were to be released in 24 months from then.

Last year, in November, during the New Zealand tour of the Indian men’s cricket team, Prime Video streamed the series live with commentaries in English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu languages. 

India is a competitive market for video streaming platforms, being a country of 140.76 Cr people of which more than 40% are internet users. Recently,  Disney+Hotstar took HBO content off the air after losing IPL streaming rights. This resulted in the company losing 3.8 Mn subscribers in the October-December quarter of 2022.

On the other hand, Jio Cinema announced that free streaming of the league has garnered 5 Cr new downloads to the app in just a week’s time. In fact, it clocked over 147 Cr video views just on the first weekend while attracting 10 Cr new viewers. The company announced that free IPL streaming has pushed the time spent during match hours by 60% to 57 minutes compared to last season’s first weekend.

Though the market is content-driven, competition seems to be stiff. Under such circumstances, how the price hike of even one platform affects the overall market, is to be observed. 

In India, Amazon Prime competes not just with global players such as Disney+Hotstar and Netflix, but also Indian players including Jio Cinema, Voot, Alt Balaji, SonyLiv, and Zee5.