Netflix India VS Amazon Prime India: Who Wins The Streaming Battle?

There’s no doubt that despite facing tough competition in the Indian market from various sources (other OTT platforms, television, etc.), Netflix India and Amazon Prime India have emerged as the two largest OTT platforms in the Indian OTT space. They both have a strong online presence with countless shows and films streaming at any given time.

Netflix and Prime both were launched in India in 2016 to provide people with countless titles at low rates. But over the years both of these platforms have taken different routes and adopted different strategies to compete with each other as well as other OTT platforms.

Today we’ll compare these two OTT platforms side-by-sides. For this comparison, I have taken into account five different measures or standard- UI, Cost, No. of original shows, Indian films, and Data Usage. So without any further ado, here we go-

UI stands for User Interface which is basically the means through which software or computer application interacts with a person. It includes all the various commands that you see on-screen when you open an application. User Interface is one of the strongest factors which determine the fate of an app, especially in this day and age, when hundreds of apps are launched every single day.

Netflix has a beautiful red and white color themed UI while Amazon Prime has a blue color themed UI. While both of these platforms have an effective and easy UI in place, Netflix stands as the clear winner. Its UI is beautifully designed that catalogs each title into a unique collection like new releases, trending, last played, thrillers, etc. Apart from this, Netflix’s player is also better than Prime. It remembers the point where you left last time, lets you skip the intro every time, automatically plays the next episode, and much more. All this makes Netflix a winner in this category.

Cost is a huge determining factor for OTT platforms in India. Since India is a third-world-country, people here can’t afford expensive entertainment. This is why for OTT platforms to make their mark in the Indian market, they had to come up with cheaper rates that were more efficient and cheap than dish TV.

Coming to the two OTT giants, Amazon Prime India offers its services at cheaper rates than Netflix India. The annual subscription of Prime costs Rs. 999 while the monthly subscription of it costs only Rs. 129. On the other hand, Netflix’s basic plans start at Rs.500 and go up to Rs. 800 per month. This is way costlier than Prime. Therefore in this category, Prime comes out as the definite winner.

The number of original shows on Netflix is way greater than the number of original shows on Prime. If we look at the number of original shows that Netflix has launched on its platform in 2020 alone, it would somewhere lie between 60-80 shows which is way ahead of the number of shows that Prime launched during this year which amounts to roughly around 20-25 shows.

Since Netflix likes to plan way ahead of its time, it always has a greater edge over other platforms in terms of original shows. The other factor to keep in mind is that Netflix operates in way more country than Prime do and offers original shows in a lot of foreign languages. Some of Netflix’s most well-known shows have been in foreign languages like Money Heist (Spanish), Narcos (Spanish), Dark (German), The Naked Director (Japanese), etc.

Since Netflix and Prime, both are American companies, one of the best ways to find which one is doing better in India is to focus on the Indian content that is available on each of these streaming platforms. When you compare Netflix with Prime, Prime clearly has more number of Indian films and shows. In 2020 alone, Prime launched 21 original Indian web series while Netflix didn’t even launch half of that number.

Coming to films, Prime has a large collection of Indian films from all regional Indian languages including Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, etc. Netflix too has many regional Indian films but its library doesn’t come close to the collection that Prime offers.

Since both Netflix and Prime offer online streaming services, they both consume a lot of data. To determine which one is the best, we must examine closely as to which one of these two consume more data. Netflix offers three choices when it comes to data consumption. For Low quality, it consumes around 0.38 GB/hour, for medium, it drains 1 GB/hour, and for high quality, it drains around 3 GB/hour. Compare this to Amazon, it offers low quality at 0.38 GB/hour, medium at 1.48 GB/hour, and High quality at 6.8 GB/hour.

This proves that Netflix consumes way less data than Prime at both medium and high quality. Therefore, Netflix is the clear winner in this category.

If you go by the total points, Netflix stands as the winner between the two. But that’s just me because for some people the cost alone could be the deciding factor whereas some people may only look at Indian content.