Amazon’s set to launch TV shows and Prime in India. Flipkart should be wary, or is it Netflix?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is making major plans for India. Screengrab from Code Conference video.

Amazon is all set to launch its Prime services in India this year, and is also talking to industry experts in Bollywood for making original shows to go with it, people aware of the matter told Tech in Asia.

The company has started making big hires for the business, and has already roped in a creative head for its Prime video services, according to LinkedIn.

“Prime services are most likely to roll out by the end of this year, probably to coincide with the festive season,” one of the people familiar with Amazon’s plans said. Amazon has been working on this for at least a year now, and was initially planning to launch last year, according to him.

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The company did not immediately respond to an email asking for more details. We will update the story as we hear from it.

Amazon in India is most popular for its ecommerce services. It also sells Kindle and has a strong AWS presence, but users are not yet familiar with a host of other customer services like video and music streaming, or free express deliveries, mostly because of the absence of Prime.

Amazon Prime is a membership-based program that allows users access to benefits like free two-day delivery, storage space, streaming of music and videos. It also accounts for the most high-value customers for the company, and has its own fan-following.

A launch of those services would mean Amazon is gearing up to create its own ecosystem in India, same as in the United States or Europe. Customers paying for Prime membership are more likely to stick to Amazon because of obvious ease of transactions. That would mean better customer loyalty, and an edge over Indian rival Flipkart.

Prime services are also a significant sales generator for the company. In the United States in 2015, Amazon saw more sales on Prime Day than on Black Friday, the day that officially kickstarts the year-end shopping season in the country.

Bollywood dive

There will soon be original content for India.

Another person Tech in Asia spoke to said the timing was right for Amazon to launch this now, because the company was convinced with the popularity of on-demand streaming services like Hotstar and even Netflix. Also, the industry is awaiting the launch of Reliance Jio’s pan-india 4G network, which promises to uplift internet surfing quality in the country.

See: India’s on the cusp of a data revolution, and Samsung just latched onto it.