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By Karan Taurani /Elara Caps
With IPL moving away from Star, Disney+Hotstar as a platform will become much smaller, tad above vs other broadcaster OTT apps helped by other cricket content.
In terms of SVOD market, they have a share of 25 percent, which will see a sharp drop and potentially move towards Voot or Jio Platforms; in terms of subs, their subs base (46 mn subscribers in India), will also come down by atleast 40-50 percent due to IPL going away and in case they don’t win other cricket properties, it may decline over 70 percent in medium term.
In terms of AVOD, they have a market share of 14 percent dominated by IPL, their AVOD market share will shrink towards 7 percent, little higher than other broadcaster OTT’s, who’s AVOD share is around 3-4 percent (Zee5 and Sony Liv), primarily due to sports (other cricket properties of Star). We believe Voot or Jio platform, will get an instant benefit in terms of number of users/subs due to IPL, however monetisation on digital won’t be easy as user experience is a key monitorable for customer retention and ARPU’s; Voot or Jio Platform will have a huge edge in terms of distribution and this May propel ARPU growth for Jio, as it may be sold as bundled deal.
Competitive intensity on the digital media will increase sharply as Disney + too will focus on a non-sports strategy, which will lead to inflation on content costs (large scale shows).
In the TV medium, Star will continue to dominate in terms of market share in the advertising and subscription segment, helped by IPL; inability of Zee/Sony to win IPL rights is a positive in our view as it would had a severe negative impact on earnings due to hefty content costs; however, we maintain our view that both platforms (Sony Liv and Zee5) will have to do a lot of work on the OTT side (user experience, large scale content and distribution) in order to emerge a winner and scale up in the highly fragmented Indian OTT market.
We have a BUY rating on Zee propelled by merger with Sony that will drive potential synergies, on the TV and digital business
