The Indian media giant Times Internet has decided to sell Amazon parts of the video streaming service MX Player. This is the latest move by the e-commerce giant to make its services and brand more well-known in smaller cities and towns in a key overseas market.
A person familiar with the situation told TechCrunch that the two companies finalized the deal on Wednesday evening. A source told TechCrunch that the deal values MX Player at less than $100 million, which is a lot less than the $500 million price at which the streamer raised its last round of funding. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because neither company has publicly commented on the deal yet.
Some of MX Player’s assets are being bought by Amazon, but not the whole company. Tencent is one of MX Player’s backers.
The deal comes after almost two years of talks between the two companies as they looked for ways to make their properties work better together. It’s been two years since Times Internet and its parent company, Times Group, tried to sell off a lot of their internet properties.
In February of last year, TechCrunch said that Amazon and MX Player were talking about making a deal. Several people familiar with the situation say that Sony tried to buy MX Player at the same time that it was trying to merge its India unit with the media company Zee. However, problems with the Zee deal stopped Sony’s attempts.
A person familiar with Amazon’s plans told TechCrunch that MX Player gives the company a marketing and distribution partner that can help make the e-commerce platform more famous and trustworthy in smaller Indian cities and towns. People in these groups really like MX Player, and Amazon’s online shopping service has long been popular only with people who live in cities. The source said that Amazon will keep the MX Player name.
Amazon has been adding more video streaming services in India so that it can be heard outside of the big towns. A type of Prime membership that includes Prime Video costs as little as $9.50 a year from the company. It also has a lot of agreements with local phone companies so that Prime Video can be bundled with their plans. In India in 2021, Amazon added a second free video viewing service that was backed by ads.
After this story came out, an Amazon representative confirmed that the company had decided to buy some of MX Player’s assets.
A spokesperson for Amazon told TechCrunch, “We are always looking for ways to bring new products and services to customers that make their lives better.” We’re excited to keep entertaining people in India with the great local originals and exclusive material that our Prime Video and miniTV services in India offer.
Reliance, which runs the biggest store chain in the country, and Disney are the leaders in the Indian video streaming service market. In late February, the two companies agreed to combine their Indian media businesses. Together, their apps had 55% of all monthly active users in India for video streaming services. UBS said that MX Player had a 15% share of the market. A business bank said that Netflix and Prime Video each had a 3–5% piece of the market.
In 2018, Times Internet paid $140 million to buy MX Player. The app, which was made in South Korea, became very famous in India because it had a feature that let you play local videos. This feature lets the app work with many different types of video files, which means it works well with the cheap Android phones that are common in developing countries.
Once Times Internet bought MX Player, they made smart moves to turn it from a local video playing app into a full video streaming platform. To meet the rising demand for online entertainment in India and many other countries, such as the UK and the US, the company put money into filling the app with a wide range of licensed and original content, such as TV shows, movies, and games.
The Indian government banned the famous short-video app TikTok in the middle of 2020. MX Player saw this as a chance to fill the gap in the market and released its own short-video app, MX TakaTak. In a move worth more than $650 million, Times Internet later sold the short-video app to ShareChat, a major Indian social media site.
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Times Internet didn’t answer right away when asked for response Thursday noon.
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