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Earlier this week, India's richest man's large-scale plans for fixed-line broadband and OTT content shocked the market. However, when experts studied the rules, they believed that his competitors and their investors had no reason to lose hope at the moment.

On August 12, Mukesh Ambani hosted thousands of investors from his oil-to-telecommunications giant Reliance Industries at the group's 42nd annual shareholder meeting in Mumbai. Although investors praised the many multi-million dollar deals and investments (some new and some old) that Ambani talked about, the warmest cheers came from a fairly mild announcement.

“Through the first day of Jio premiere, premium Jio Fiber customers will be able to watch movies in their living rooms on the same day these movies are shown in theaters,” Ambani said, drew thunderous applause and celebrations on Twitter. "... The price of the Jio Fiber plan will be between 700 rupees (10 U.S. dollars) to 10,000 rupees per month to meet various budgets and needs."

Jio Fiber, unveiled at AGM, is Reliance's long-awaited fixed-line broadband service and will be launched on September 5. It will provide buyers with free fixed-line voice calls, high-speed broadband and high-definition for life, all TVs are bundled in one connection, except for one dish of the monthly subscription fee.

The first-day premiere announcement frightened investors in the multi-hall industry worth 10,000 crore in India, and the stocks of many multi-hall operators fell on the BSE.

"This is a wise strategy for two reasons. First, the launch of Jio 4G shows that fast and cheap access can drive a large demand for content. With Jio Fiber, content will be further absorbed and the scale will be larger. ," said Amit Adarkar, Chief Executive Officer of Ipsos India and Director of Operations for Asia Pacific, a British market research company. "Providing third-party content is a great way to satisfy well-known content machines. This supports Jio's strategy of almost owning a data pipeline."

Ambani also said that Jio Fiber will allow users to access the company's OTT platform Jio TV, as well as the option of bundling subscriptions to third parties, thus creating waves in India's overcrowded and highly competitive OTT content market. Party premium video application.

India's OTT industry currently has an estimated 35 participants, including multinational giants such as Netflix and Amazon's Prime Video, and domestic giants such as Hotstar, Voot (owned by Reliance) and Zee5.

At least three OTT platforms ALTBalaji, ErosNOW and Netflix have been bundled with Jio mobile phones. Jio can also extend these partnerships to its fixed-line business. Netflix declined to comment on this matter.

Many in the industry believe that by providing bundled third-party OTT services, Jio may be in a good position to determine revenue sharing arrangements in the long run.

However, some people said that the reaction to these announcements may be premature.

"Jio mobile phone users can already access the company's own and third-party content from other OTT service providers. Therefore, Jio's move is nothing new. Because the changes are the screen size and user experience features," one declined to say The name of the media industry veteran said.

Jio now has 340 million users and is the country's largest telecom operator, surpassing companies such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone-Idea. More importantly, Jio registers more than 10 million new customers every month.

Now, the company has also made ambitious plans for Jio Fiber-covering 20 million houses and 15 million commercial establishments in 1600 cities and towns in the next 12 months.

Advait Gupt, co-founder of Mumbai-based content creator Supari Studios, said: “If a player engaged in the content (creation) business also has a distribution channel or connection provider, it has a strong advantage.” “To a large extent. On the other hand, compared with other telecom operators, more Internet users give Jio the advantage of pushing its services to a larger audience."

In addition, industry experts said that Jio's latest move is in line with the group's strategy to disrupt the business through innovation and pricing. For example, in 2002, Reliance Communications disrupted the mobile phone industry by providing free phones for subscription mobile services.

“Bundled services and affordable data connections will bring added value to consumers and will affect pricing. The market will see adjustments in the pricing of OTT services, which is good news for consumers,” Gupt said.

Although Jio has an advantage over competitors, it will not be smooth sailing for the company.

Content monetization is the biggest challenge facing Jio. So far, it has benefited from the lowest pricing of its mobile data plans.

A report published in September 2018 by Strategy Analytics, a US-based marketing and analysis consulting company stated that “India’s willingness to pay for digital content is still very low”. To be successful in the content area, participants must merge the business it adds, models and user experiences that resonate with the target customer group.

In addition, developing fiber-optic Internet services is not as easy as expanding mobile data services.

Adarkar of Ipsos said: "The company may face some delays in the physical expansion of its fixed network." Connected. This may affect its ambitious plan to attract more data users. Also, I'm not sure how Jio Fiber will address the "next" 500 million customers, people who have not yet accessed the Internet."

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