Amazon MX Player wants to shake up India’s free OTT market, but can it challenge YouTube?

In a major push for free streaming in India, Amazon MX Player—the result of the recent merger of Amazon miniTV and MX Player—unveiled its mammoth slate of 100 new and returning shows for 2025 earlier this month. The splash, which came in the form of the platform's inaugural StreamNext event, was a star-studded affair and perhaps necessary, too. 

“It has been a long time coming,” a streaming executive told The CapTable. “MX Player didn’t have any major programming announcements through the 2023-24 period. So, it needed to be sold [in a grand way] and its acquisition by Amazon kind of accelerated that growth.”

Amazon’s earlier free streaming proposition, miniTV, could not scale beyond a point due to multiple factors, including low reach and discoverability as the service largely stayed hidden within the Amazon shopping app. Many even saw it as a filler in the wider shopping experience. 

But with the MX Player acquisition last September, Amazon has now thrown its hat into India’s steadily expanding free streaming ring where it will compete with undisputed market leader YouTube, which boasts over 500 million monthly users, JioHotstar (partially freemium, even though its new pricing plans are not entirely known), and several other OTT apps offering catch-up TV content. 

And then there’s Instagram Reels, which now allows longer video uploads (up to three minutes, from its earlier 60-second limit). For context, a whopping 47 million reels are posted in India every day, according to estimates from the newly formed India Influencer Governance Council (IIGC).