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by porridgeraisin 481 days ago
While I agree with your overarching point re:saturation,

> haven't found more than 25 million subscribers

There is a metric ton of demand for steaming services in India.. just that amazon prime and hotstar.com took most of the market. Most of this is due to pricing:

Prime: 999 INR/year Netflix: 650 INR/month

Recently they've tried segmenting.. by packaging a single-device 720p-only plan along with the telecom plans, and I'd bet that's the majority of their customer base today since people get it for free. They also have a deal with samsung and other companies that make mid-range phones which most people in india own to have netflix pre-installed. So this + the telecom plans is the way they count them as users.

To be fair, amazon packages theirs with the 1-day delivery service on amazon.in, so it's a bit of an unfair advantage there. But even if you compare with hotstar, they charge 1499/year, which is about 1/6th of netflix's price.

Again to be fair, live cricket streaming is _huge_ here, and people get hotstar for that anyways, so a bit of an unfair advantage again.

Even twitch managed to make price cuts here. I bet netflix can as well. I doubt regional content production is actually a problem for somebody like netflix.