Over-the-Top Video Services in India: Media Imperialism after Globalization

Abstract

This article reviews the rapid growth of over-the-top (OTT) video services in India, such as Voot, Hotstar, Netflix, and Amazon, and places their development in the context of the dominant trends and business models at the international level. The expansion of such services in India, a country that ranks as the second largest market globally for "tech companies" such as Facebook and Amazon, raises questions about conceptions of development, participation, diversity, and power used to understand platformization in areas such as communication and culture. The article assesses the specific dynamics of platform growth in the country in relation to the interplay between new digital infrastructures, including fiber-optic cables, broadband networks, and smartphones; corporate strategies among small and large, local and international players; and state policy and regulation, which seeks to both address concerns about economic, political, and cultural security and spur the socioeconomic development of India among "wired" nations.The development of internet-distributed video, known as over-the-top (OTT) video services, marks a disruptive intervention in the markets for audiovisual content across the world. The scale of the market ambitions involved has led to renewed debate about the concept of "media imperialism" as a framework for understanding the international communication order. On the one hand, liberal and futurist accounts position disruptive platforms as startup businesses favoring amateur production and supporting "new voices" as a counterpoint to the hegemony of legacy media actors. On the other hand, critical political economists of communication argue that the age of media imperialism has returned with a vengeance, given the global market power of major US-based "IT" or "tech companies" and the support those companies receive from the US state. 2 Given the potentials of its large and growing user-base, India has emerged as the latest territory ripe for the global expansion of US OTT video platforms. US tech companies are well aware that "Despite infrastructural challenges,

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