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Dear Reader,

It is widely known that American internet giants consider India to be a booming user farm for digital products. Their playbook is simple: Earn revenues from Western consumers and get daily active users from India’s rapidly rising internet population. Kunal Shah, the founder of unicorn fintech startup CRED, summed it up best: “When you join the numbers, they look nice.”

But there are always exceptional business outcomes. For instance, India is estimated to have generated 9% of Netflix’s global revenues in Q3 of CY2020. And its subscriber count in the country likely grew more than 200% to reach 4 Mn+ by the end of the year, according to a report by Media Partners Asia.

Netflix was not the only over-the-top (OTT) video platform to register mammoth growth in the year of lockdowns. As people were mandated to stay at home to help contain the pandemic’s spread, their consumption of digital content grew, and so did video OTT subscriptions. According to India Brand Equity Foundation, the sector saw a 30% rise in the number of paid subscribers, from 22.2 Mn to 29 Mn, between March and July of 2020.