JioCinema announces annual subscription plan of Rs 999
HBO’s material is now available on Mukesh Ambani’s JioCinema, around a month after the deal was announced. After saying goodbye to Disney+ Hotstar on March 31, HBO and Warner Brothers announced a collaboration with Reliance to provide their exclusive content to JioCinema. JioCinema has recently unveiled a Rs 999 annual subscription option for Hollywood material.
JioCinema has quickly risen to the top of Indian viewers’ daily watchlists, first with exclusive digital rights to India’s greatest sports competition, the Indian Premier League, and now with unique American content.
HBO originals like Game of Thrones and Succession have been huge hits with the Indian audience. It is projected that the loss of HBO content will result in the loss of approximately 8 million customers.
The IPL, which was formerly available for streaming on Disney+ Hotstar, took a big hit when Reliance won the deal for around Rs 23,000 crore.
JioCinema
Despite monetisation, Karan Taurani of Elara Capital highlighted that JioCinema’s pricing is at the lower end of premium OTT platform yearly pricing, which is in the region of INR 1000-2000 for an annual package. “However, we don’t see a large scale paid subscriber base as a result of this, as Indian audiences are value driven and may not pay this much only for price HBO/Warner Bros content,” he added.
“We do not anticipate a large scale paid subscriber base for Jio Cinema based solely on HBO/Warner Bros content; expect more content offerings to bundle (new films direct OTT or any other global content) in order to achieve scale in this type of any offering,” Taurani added.
Making the Indian audience pay exclusively for HBO material is unlikely to pay off right away. JioCinema, on the other hand, is on its way to consolidating audiences with other content still available for free.
Disney + Hotstar had the greatest paid subscriber base in India (61 million paid subscribers before losing IPL and HBO programming), owing mostly to IPL, worldwide content, web series, movies, and catch-up TV material; in order to expand up to that level
