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Introduction
Propelled by the lockdown caused by COVID 19, the over-the-top (OTT) market is emerging as a fast-growing market. Though it is at a relatively nascent stage, its worldwide market in 2019 was estimated at US$121.61bn, and it is expected to reach US$1039.03 in 2027, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.4% (Rake and Gaikward, 2021). Even the number of subscribers to Netflix, an OTT service provider, alone has surpassed the number of paid cable TV subscribers in the USA (Richter, 2017). OTT services can be described as the one that is delivered over online networks (Alrutz, 2018). The name is derived from the fact that these services ride on the top of an existing service (TRAI, 2015) that a customer already has. OTT does not require any broadcasting station, a cable connection or a satellite television platform (Endavo, 2021). Its content can be delivered through the internet and smart TVs PlayStation, Chromecast, Xbox, Fire Stick and other compatible hardware devices such as mobile and desktop devices (Li, 2017).
In this era of information technology (IT), the internet is the backbone of a country's economy (OECD, 2011). The growth of networks that allow integrated data, voice and video services over the internet (IP-networks) has enabled OTT providers to deliver their programmes directly to the end-users (Baldry et al., 2014). Though there is no universally accepted classification of the services that are offered over the Internet, Figure 1 provides a classification of the same based on a broad set of use cases (Baldry et al., 2014). The classification is not exhaustive because due to the World Wide Web's pervasiveness, it is not possible to classify all its uses. In the given Figure 1, mostly, the video and audio contents that are being streamed over the internet have been classified as OTT media since “Media” is a term used to describe the tools that mediate human communications (Kim, 1998).
Figure 2 shows the growth of the internet globally. As per Cisco (2020), the number of internet users is estimated to be at a CAGR of 6% from 3.9 billion in 2018 to 5.3 billion by 2023, representing 51% of the world population in 2018 and 66% of the world population by 2023.