MX Player Tops India’s Video Streaming App For Time Spent

Times Internet-owned short video platform MX Player has emerged as the leading video streaming app in India in 2020, in terms of time spent by users, as per a recent report by global mobile app analytics firm App Annie. 

On average, each MX Player user spent 7.8 hours per month on the app, compared to 4.5 hours for Hotstar, 7.4 hours for Netflix and 4.4 hours for Amazon Prime Video. Thus, MX Player was only behind YouTube, where an average Indian user spent 26.4 hours per month in 2020.

As for the other key markets in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, Netflix took the top rank in Australia, Indonesia and South Korea, while Prime Video was ranked at the top in Japan. Video sharing website Bilibili was the top-ranked video streaming app in China. Notably, while Netflix and Amazon Prime charge their users a subscription fee, MX Player in India and Bilibili in China are offered free of cost. This could explain MX Player’s position at the top in India, a market with a substantially lower per capita disposable income when compared to the other markets for OTT platforms in the APAC region. 

According to a recent App Annie report titled State of Mobile 2021, India recorded 24.27 Bn app downloads across the iOS App Store and Google Play Store in 2020, with users also spending $500 Mn on mobile apps. MX Player has more than 500 Mn downloads on the Google Play Store. 

Further, India ranked third in terms of the average hours spent per user on their mobile phones, with the average Indian smartphone owner spending 4.6 hours daily using their phone in 2020, ranked behind Brazil (4.8 hours), and Indonesia (5.2 hours). In 2019, the average Indian spent 3.3 hours per day using their phone. The data only includes numbers for Android smartphone users. 

MX Player ranked seventh in the list of top 10 apps in India in terms of their monthly active users (MAUs) last year. WhatsApp ranked first, Facebook second and Truecaller third. 

According to data for June 2020 from BARC Nielsen, MX Player was ranked at the top among 55 OTT platforms in India, in terms of the number of unique visitors, which stood at 148.4 Mn. 

The high user engagement metrics for MX Player could be attributed to the in-app gaming feature, which the company launched in February 2020. 

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