It is early yet for a report card on OTT biz: Amazon Prime Video's Gandhi

Lunch with BS: Meet Gaurav Gandhi, Country Head of Amazon Prime Video, India

There is something of an eager schoolboy about Gaurav Gandhi. He is patient, soft spoken and gets to the nub of things very quickly. And his experience across advertising (Madison), broadcast television (Turner, Star India, NDTV Imagine), cable (Sun18, IndiaCast) and streaming video (Voot, Amazon Prime Video) gives him a unique perspective. Little wonder, then, that the 46-year-old country head of Amazon Prime Video is among my favourite go-to persons for industry gyaan.

We are meeting after two years at a restaurant overlooking the sea at Mumbai’s happening Soho House — a perfect setting for a catch-up. Gandhi gives me his trademark shy smile and a brief hug before we settle down.

Amazon Prime Video has been on a roll. From Pushpa (Telugu) and Ponmagal Vandhal (Tamil) to Gehraiyaan (Hindi) and Malik (Malayalam), it has streamed every major film in the last few years. Prime Video is now available in 10 languages across 4,500 Indian towns. The revenue numbers are not easy to come by, but it has four times as many subscribers as Netflix, the other comparable subscription-driven video-on-demand (SVoD). With hits such as The Family Man and Mirzapur, its hold over top shows on SVoD is second only to Disney+ Hotstar. “It is too early for a report card on the industry. We have had a solid, good start,” says Gandhi.

We had agreed on a light lunch and begin with salads. The chicken and avocado is nice but the lemon and broccoli is nothing to write home about. Gandhi takes a sip of his Diet Coke before responding to my question on how Amazon, which he joined in 2018, has been like. “There has been a meteoric learning,” he says. It is a word that pops up more than a dozen times in our three-hour-long chat. And it dovetails nicely with Gandhi’s journey, which we dig into with the salad.

For as long as he can remember, Gandhi was fascinated by advertising. He had a regular childhood growing up in Delhi. His maternal grandfather was a big influence and a disciplinarian. It was at the ad agency run by his father’s sister in Lucknow that his fascination for all things media and communication began. Then, in 1991, cable came to India and brought with it the music video world. “I was enamoured by CNN, MTV, Channel [V],” remembers Gandhi. And so, after BCom, he opted for an MBA at the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai simply because it offered a specialisation in advertising. Sam Balsara’s Madison World came looking during the placement week in 1998 and Gandhi signed to work on the Coke account.

“I enjoyed media planning but wanted it to become broader,” he says. So, in 2000, he joined Turner Broadcasting to work on content, consumer and media research. But that wasn’t broad enough either. Three years later, he moved to Star. At some point he began working with the programming head and later chief operating officer, Sameer Nair. “Lots of my learning of media started then,” says Gandhi. When Nair left to set up Imagine, a Hindi general entertainment channel for NDTV, Gandhi followed.

Three years later, in 2010, he moved to the budding Viacom18 as chief commercial officer and head of international business. This was, in many ways, the turning point. His job there was to expand the international reach and revenue of Colors, Nick and other Viacom18 channels. A year later, he was heading Sun18 North, a television distribution joint venture between Viacom18 and Sun Network. And by 2012, he was CEO of IndiaCast, a distribution JV between sibling firms  — Network18 and Viacom18. The first five years thereon were packed with learning — more of it.

Not one to settle in a comfort zone, Gandhi was by 2015 yet again restless. 

“I told Sudhanshu (Vats, then group CEO, Viacom18) that I want to leave and do digital. Because of my international experience, I knew this is where it was going,” he recalls. “Sudhanshu said ‘do it here’, and set a tough deadline of 6-8 months.”

Remember, back then, there was nobody big in the space — YouTube came in 2008 and Hotstar seven years after that. There was little technical or content understanding to tap into. But Gandhi learnt the streaming video space from ground zero, and in May 2016, Voot was launched. “It was the steepest learning curve and we scaled it pretty quickly,” he says. Two years later came the Prime Video offer.

“The way it (Amazon) thinks, the culture of organisation, the level of detailing and the super long-term view they take on things is something else. It has taught me skills that will go with me way beyond this job,” reckons Gandhi. He lists a host of decisions: from the language expansion to every little tweak and change to the product — the X-ray facility on screen, the mobile plan, all of which were done with an eye on covering the whole of India across regions, languages or socio-economic segments. Gandhi keeps emphasising the heterogeneity of the India market to explain Prime Video’s thinking. “We had to go where the consumer is, and go deep. There was an early investment in how we took to small towns. The business 

is all about segmentation, to be able to serve the right cohort. We are programming as a network, not a channel,” he says, coming alive.

Our lunch by now is no longer as light as we had intended to keep it. The chicken tikka is excellent but the burnt garlic noodles are just about okay. We eschew desert for green tea before I ask him a question everybody asks of a senior person at Prime Video.

With a $470 billion e-commerce giant backing it, Prime Video doesn’t have the same pressures as, say, Netflix, which is a standalone business. The Prime programme is about signing on members for free delivery; music and video are thrown in. Does life become easier if the main motive is selling shoes and groceries, not video? “Prime is a unique programme. Every benefit has to work — shopping, video, music. My job is to delight the video consumers,” Gandhi replies.

Almost every OTT is doing that. In 2021, investment in video OTT content in India was about $1.2 billion, according to Media Partners Asia data. The entire business earned just about $1.9 billion in advertising and pay revenues. How long will the party last?

“About 120 million homes pay for cable month on month, so there is a propensity to pay. Plus, 30-50 million people go to multiplexes. Then, look at 500-600 million people who spend hours on entertainment. The opportunity for revenue plus the intent to watch is so large that it is viable,” says Gandhi. Trust him to break it down to numbers you can’t argue with. So like Gaurav Gandhi, I think as we bid goodbye.