Viacom18: Creating a Sustainable Video Streaming (OTT) Business in India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Viacom18, a Reliance Industries Ltd. company, acquired the streaming rights for the popular Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament for 2023-2027 for a whopping $2.89 billion. Unlike the previous rights holder, Disney+Hotstar, which put the streaming behind a paywall, Viacom18 decided to offer free streaming, betting on increased advertisement revenue from a massive increase in viewership. However, the free streaming for the 2023 IPL season only brought in advertisement revenues of $276 million against a projection of $450 million. The Viacom18 team needed to rethink its mix of advertising and subscription revenue. It had three options: a pure advertising-supported model (AVoD); a subscription model with packages for the IPL, possibly including a cheaper package with ad-supported content; and a blended business model that would combine the AVoD model with a small subscription fee (sachet pricing) specifically for the IPL. If the advertising-based model had created a large enough user base, it would have attracted advertisers and generated a profit. In the 2023 season, however, it produced only 60% of projected revenues, which was insufficient to pay the IPL licensing fee. On the other hand, a subscription-based model, although likely to create more revenue per user, would dramatically reduce the customer base because of Indian consumers' price sensitivity. Such a model also might not meet revenue expectations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".