Four years ago, Karan joined MX Player as CEO and has helped the brand build into a successful multi use case company offering movies, shows, music, gaming and more.
According to him the subscription model is not an established model of value exchange and therefore “may not be the way forward in India.
MX Player has 400 million users globally, and more than 200 million users in India. According to Karan, Indian online curated content platforms (OCC) needs to be more adaptive, rather than expecting that every users will pay for a subscription. Karan hopes that within the next few years, MX Player will have 700-800 million users, and the top 5-10% will be paid subscriptions, whereas the next tier of 10-15% will have a paid relationship such as one-time purchases. Karan confirmed that The Times Group acquiring a majority stake in the company, as well as significant investment from the Chinese multinational technology conglomerate offered MX Player a lot of learnings in their respective areas of expertise.
In October 2021, MX Player became the first and only app out of India to cross 1 billion downloads. MX Player’s Takatak, the platform’s short video app. was conceived in a day and launched within a week. Currently, TakaTak has more than 70 million users. Karan mentioned that the tech’s ability to recommend content is crucial to the success of the app because users are switching content every thirty seconds.
MX Player has also become a powerhouse in the gaming industry. This has presented MX with significant cross-selling opportunities. Karan mentioned that people who came on the platform to play casual games end up interacting more with our other products. This has continued to help the company grow. Karan credits the speed at which MX Player executes ideas, and has seen them to fruition, as one key to its success. He mentioned that this is an ideology rather than a culture, and elaborated that this kind of rapid growth relies on empowering people at every level of the company to not only to voice their ideas, but also to act on them. “You have to give people the freedom to experiment and feel safe about it.”
To hear more from this interview, watch the full video above.
Featured image from the Aashram, courtesy MX Media.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karan Bedi
Karan has over a decade of experience across media, technology and education industries. Under Karan’s able leadership – MX TakaTak has emerged as the market leader in this product category, catering to over 150Mn Monthly Active Users. Previously Karan has been the Chief Operating Officer and helped set up Eros Now, one of India’s largest OTT platforms Bollywood for the world. He was also the co-founder and CEO of ContentFlow Technologies, a company focused on creating innovative and engaging content experiences in infotainment and education and Tutorific, a cutting-edge adaptive learning system. He is an alumnus of the prestigious Stanford University.
