Amazon Prime says diversity is at the heart of all their decision-making for the India market

In this episode of ‘Media Dialogue’, the spotlight is on the great content deluge that is inundating us. Amazon Prime Video has announced a massive slate of new shows and films for India. It also announced the launch of its transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) movie rental service in the country - Prime Video Store.

Through this service, customers can now get early access to the latest Indian and international movies, including a rich catalogue of popular movies (award winners and franchises) from around the world on a transactional (per-movie) basis.

The TVOD rental service will be available to all Prime members, as well as, anyone who isn't a Prime member.

CNBC-TV18’s Anuradha SenGupta spoke Aparna Purohit, the Head of India Originals at Amazon Prime Video India, and Gaurav Gandhi, Country Head of Amazon Prime Video India to understand their India strategy and to get a sense of the big picture for the entertainment industry.

On massive content lined-up Purohit said, “Our focus always is our customer and all our decisions are really customer backward. We are constantly trying to see, what is it that our customers want to watch? What are the wide spaces that exist? What are the genres that are underserved? That I think is the starting point and then I have always said that for us the starting point is a good story. Why the story, what is so compelling about this story, and whose favourite show is this story going to become? Is the story keeping the creator up at night, the passion of the creator? Really, I think that is the starting point for us."

She added, "Diversity is at the heart of all our decision-making. It’s the diversity of genres of formats, of stories of working with both established and newer, independent voices, in the cinema of working across languages, because we really believe that good stories just transcend all barriers of language and ethnicity, and nationality.”

On rental service Gandhi said, “Our objective in the country is that we want to be the most love entertainment hub for customers, which we will have the offering from the prime programme and our core prime service which comes from all the originals. We have launched new transaction video service. All of this ultimately is about the same ambition of super-serving the customer. Because we know, you as a customer love variety of things and we can give you all that offering, and can create a lot of that ourselves and also can work with partners who create great content and offer that to you.”