By 2025, three in four internet users will consume short-form videos: Bain & Company Report

With more people staying at home, online video consumption, which was already witnessing a massive surge, has skyrocketed in the last one year. India’s online video user base has scaled to more than 350 million people, growing at 24% annually from 2018 to 2020—two times faster than countries such as China and Indonesia, the report “Online videos in India – The long and short of it” by Bain & Company revealed. Time spent on online videos per daily active user per day has increased by 60% to 70% over this period. Despite this rapid boom, there exists massive headroom for growth—online video user penetration in India is nearly 60% of Internet users, compared with more than 90% in China, the report pointed.

Interestingly, the Indian Internet user spends more time online than several countries globally, including China. Most of this time — a staggering one hour per day for a smartphone user — is spent consuming videos. What’s more, in India the short-form videos (SFV) market has exploded over the past two years—growing 3.5 times in user base and 12 times in total time spent by all users on SFV platforms. More than 200 million Indians watched SFVs at least once in 2020, with an active user spending up to 45 minutes a day on these platforms. By 2025, three in four internet users, or 600 million to 650 million Indians, will consume SFV, on average spending up to 55 to 60 minutes per day on SFV platforms.

Digital video entertainment consists of short-form videos (SFV), which are between 15 seconds and two minutes, and long-form videos (LFV), which are more than two minutes long.

LFV, on the other hand, has substantial scale—viewed by 350 million to 400 million users, almost twice as penetrated as SFV. The format has seen substantial growth, with users and usage increasing nearly 1.5 times from 2018 to 2020. Active users today spend more than 2.5 hours per day on long-form content. According to the report, LFV is poised to grow to 600 million to 650 million users in India by 2025. “This growth will be driven by a steady increase in the Internet user base; access to cheaper, faster data; the introduction of more affordable plans, including the advent of freemium models; and a proliferation of content. A strong push on regional and vernacular content will accelerate this even further—85% of content viewed is non-English, and 30% is in languages other than English or Hindi,” the report stated.

“Content creators are key to the success of short-video platforms – Indian short form video platforms have hustled to onboard top creators with a large fan following. India has more than 15 million users who create and post at least one short-video in a month. Growing creator base is giving rise to a robust creator economy—an enabling ecosystem of players helping creators with training and development, content creation, monetisation, financing, and business management,” Sriwatsan Krishnan, partner, Bain & Company stated.

The report also highlighted that trends that will shape the SFV market in India are content curation and social-led engagement, monetisation, innovations to onboard the next wave of users, emergence of a robust creator ecosystem, niche platforms within larger SFV ecosystems. Meanwhile, content explosion, value chain integration, hyper-personalisation, increased monetisation, gamifiation/social engagement and content moderation are the trends that will shape the LFV space going forward.

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