Free is not an offer, it’s actually an emotion for Bharat: Nikhil Gandhi

“The only person who has been able to crack Bharat is Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There’s so much to learn from him, he is the man who really understands Bharat,” remarked Nikhil Gandhi, COO, MX Player, while speaking at Goafest 2022. At the same time, he said that there are very few brands in India that understand Bharat well. “That is exactly what MX Player has been trying to achieve over the last three years,” he added.

Gandhi further said that over these three years, through the numbers and the scale that MX Player has achieved, they have understood that “Bharat is not exactly what Bharat means. It actually means that it is an emotion that is driven by a few key initiatives that come out of the consumption patterns of what we observe in the consumers”.

Sharing more on this Bharat, Gandhi said, “Firstly, Bharat has 200 million TV homes. It has 600 million smartphone users of which 97% or about 575 million are Android users. About 65% of them own a smartphone that costs less than Rs 15,000. The average data consumption of these users is less than 0.5 GB per day.” He further said that research done by MX Player has shown that data consumption starts picking up in the night. That is because the recharge of that data pack happens at night for the next day. “With that anecdote and insights, we have created the emotion of Bharat by offering our content for free. Our app is free, content is free. So, free is not an offer, it’s actually an emotion,” he asserted.

Gandhi further informed that MX Player is the only Indian app to achieve 1 billion downloads on Play Store and added, “We have a presence in over 250 countries. We are a global business, with an average time spent on the app at 56 minutes per user per day.”

Adding further, he affirmed, “We have truly democratised content consumption by giving access to content free of cost. The most watched show on Indian digital platforms is ‘Ashram’, which has been watched by 150 million users – this is double the size of an entire season of people who watch IPL on the digital platform.