Adoption and Challenges Underlying OTT Platform in India during Pandemic: A Critical Study of Socio-Economic and Technological Issues

The present era of rapid technological changes and the rising rate of internet penetration has created a stride for an individual’s entertainment preferences. The rise of Over-the-Top (OTT) media services has made strides by altering the media space during the pandemic caused by COVID. Smart phones and access to broad band made OTT acceptable by a large part of the population worldwide. The handheld device OTT is becoming the preferred mode of content consumption by the viewers in India as well. However, there are certain shortcomings of this emerging mode of media mostly in terms of socio-economic as well as technological issues. In addition to finding the growing demands of OTT, present study emphasized on the challenges posed for the adoption of this rapidly preferred media platform. On the analysis of the data collected from the respondents in the twin city of Odisha (Cuttack and Bhubaneswar), the findings revealed three prime factors such as ‘user behaviour’, ‘technological flexibility’ and ‘customer-centric content’ to be the significant influencers of OTT content. The insights of this study can help the regulatory authorities as well as OTT media players in promotion and strategy formulation.