Industrial and Financial Structures of Over-the-Tops (OTTs) in India

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to bring out the challenges of deploying over-the-top (OTT) offers in the audio-visual sector in India. To delimit its scope, a first precision must be provided about the notion of OTTs and a second clarification must relate to the components of the audio-visual field that will be addressed. First, OTTs operate over telecommunications networks, and therefore enable them to operate over national regulatory frameworks, especially Broadcasting Acts. Being important consumers of bandwidth, OTTs have typically conflicted with telecommunications operators, sometimes even leading to their streaming being blocked. But by the end of 2010, in many countries, including to a certain extent India, the different actors involved seemed to have reached to a level of consensus. Second, in this chapter we focus on “professionally” produced audio-visual OTT suppliers, that is to say, commercially produced content variously remunerated by the OTT platform, and therefore not user-generated content (UGC) audio-visual content.