Some will ditch pirated content at our price point: Tim Leslie

Amazon has launched Prime Video in India, which offers a wide variety of movies and series, including original content such as shows The Grand Tour, Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle. The Amazon Prime Video will be offered along with Prime membership which is for Rs 499 for a year. The company, which is offering a 30-day free trial for Prime membership, announced it has started production of the new Indian original series, which will be made available the following year. Tim Leslie, vice president, Amazon Instant Video International, spoke to Collin Furtado on its subscription model, pricing, piracy and investment in India.

Will Prime Video maintain the same subscription model?

What we are announcing is unlimited on-demand watching of the most recent TV shows at Rs 499, so that is Rs 41.50 on a monthly basis. It is a very compelling offer to have for all that content.

Why is Amazon Prime Video being offered at such a low price in India?

What we do in our Prime pricing is whichever country we launched in, it is a compelling value proposition. So, the Prime pricing varies in all the five countries in which we have added the video services. In the countries that we are already present such as US, UK, Germany and Japan, the cost of Prime varies. We are always looking at the local market place to determine what is the right value proposition.

What are the steps Amazon is taking to protect its content from piracy?

I view piracy as an opportunity to un-map customer needs. I think if you can provide a great platform which can solve customer needs, solves playback issues with variable playback, solves data issues and provides downloading for offline viewing as well as content that they can only find on our service, it will be a much better experience than pirating content. So my view is everything can be pirated but a lot of the content which is less readily available, when pirated, is not as good as the playback experience. I think there will be customers who pirate content who will decide that for Rs 499 they can stop pirating and get incredibly compelling content, plus free shipping on millions of items. We are going to give them more and more ways to watch.

Will the creation of original content be included in your investment plans?

I can tell you that we have made a big investment in sourcing compelling content and we are going to continue to increase that content for our Indian customers. We are going to make sure that Prime Video gets better. We have an aggressive original series that we are making here in India and we will continue to invest in originals.