An internal document obtained last year by Reuters revealed Amazon's strategy of hoarding more consumers for its e-commerce business by offering them complimentary video and music streaming services. While a lot of users buy or renew their Prime subscriptions for their favorite TV shows and movies, including certain Amazon Prime exclusives as well as Amazon's own productions, they end up using the benefits of one or two-day delivery to buying more products on its e-commerce platform. This scheme appears to have struck well with Amazon's biggest rival in India, the Walmart-acquired Flipkart, which is now evaluating its own video streaming service later this year.
The service from Flipkart, Money Control reports, is expected to be launched late in September when the pre-Diwali shopping spree starts to set off in India. As per the people aware of the matter, this service will be offered to the members of the Flipkart Plus loyalty program. Unlike an Amazon Prime membership, Flipkart Plus is not available for purchase and users to have to accumulate credits – called SuperCoins, which are earned on every purchase on the platform. A user automatically becomes eligible for the Flipkart Plus membership once they amass 300 SuperCoins over a period of 12 months.
Unlike Amazon, which has a separate app for Prime Video content, Flipkart's video streaming service will be available from within the shopping app itself. As per Money Control, Flipkart will be licensing content from the likes of Walt Disney and Balaji Telefilms instead of investing in originals. Since Disney's content is distributed by Hotstar in India while Balaji has its own ALT Balaji app, it will be interesting to see how this equation works out for Flipkart. Bollywood remains to be bona fide element of the service. Meanwhile, the company may eventually try to bag streaming rights for exclusive content to attract users.
Experts believe that since there's no upfront cost to join Flipkart Plus, it may finally woo users to buy more on Flipkart. Besides faster delivery and now, the in-app video streaming, Flipkart Plus can be used to avail services via hundreds of other partner platforms such as OYO for booking Hotels, Zomato for ordering food, and much more including premium memberships to other streaming services such as Sony LIV, YouTube Premium, Hungama, and Gaana.
Story Via: Bloomberg
Update: Flipkart rolls out Videos section within its Android app
Flipkart has begun rolling out its Video service, but unlike Amazon, the company has chosen not to decouple the video service into a separate app. As a result, the latest Flipkart v6.17 on Android has a new Videos section on the left sidebar. The app asks users to pick a few videos in order to suggest further content of movies and TV shows. Currently, the video section has content from creators like Dice Media, Arre, TVF and Voot, though we can expect the selection to expand in the future based on market feedback.
Source: NDTV Gadgets
The post [Update: Rolling out] Flipkart plans to launch a free video streaming service to compete with Amazon appeared first on xda-developers.
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