Online Retailer Amazon, in a bid to expand its range of offerings, besides introducing its Prime subscription service, might as well launch music, movie and video streaming services in the Indian market.
Nitesh Kripalani, former executive vice president at Multi Screen Media was recently appointed as the head of digital content and is expected to soon start negotiations with large music and movie companies, like Yash Raj Films and Eros International Media.
The company is currently in the process of analysing the practicality and economic feasibility of building up a much needed content library. The biggest hurdle that stands in Amazon’s path is undoubtedly the slow internet speed. And the experts are still trying to figure out ways to get around it. Amazon supposedly would be using the ‘streaming’ option rather than the ‘download’ option that was used by Flipkart’s digital music store, which failed to gather any userbase and was shut down a year and half after its inception.
Also, for the Prime service, the company already has started increasing its logistics and shipping team and is expected to more than double it to 14,000 people by Mid-2015 from the 6,000. Amazon would be launching this service as a countermeasure to Flipkart First, a similar annual subscription service launched last year by its arch rival Flipkart.
According to experts, although India is the smallest ecommerce market of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries, but Amazon is betting big on the potential of this market. But, to believe that Indian market would soon become as significant as the Chinese one would be a big mistake.
Amazon previously tried to penetrate the Chinese market but to no success. Dominated by homegrown companies, Chinese market did not help Amazon grow any bit and hence the US based ecommerce giant is now relying heavily on the Indian market.
