TikTok's loss in India has been TakaTak's gain. After the Indian government banned the Chinese short-video platform in June 2020, several domestic brands have emerged, drawing in millions of users.

India's short-form video (SFV) market is expected to balloon over the coming years, with the number of users likely to more than double to 500-600 million by 2025. TikTok was launched in India in 2016 and once had 200 million active monthly users, besides 20 million active content creators.

TikTok and 200 other mobile applications (including PUBG mobile, which was extremely popular) were banned by India; however, they are gradually being replaced by homegrown outfits, including MX TakaTak (about 12 million users), Moj (10 to 15 million), Zili, Roposo and Josh. Top international players have also launched their apps; they include Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts.

In a recent report titled 'Online videos in India: The long and short of it', Bain & Company pointed out that the daily time spent by active users on online videos in the country has grown by 60 to 70 per cent over the past two years. Active users spend up to 45 minutes daily on these platforms.

"India has a large digital community, with about 640 million Internet users and 550 million smartphone users, which is rapidly growing and spending more time online," said Apran Sheth, partner and global leader, Bain & Company, while releasing the report.

"Smartphone users spend about 4.8 hours on their devices daily, of which a staggering one hour on average is spent consuming videos. Despite this rapid boom, there exists massive headroom for growth—online video user penetration in India is nearly 60% of Internet users, compared with more than 90% in China."

Consulting firm RedSeer in a report noted that short-form content will overtake over-the-top (OTT) or streaming video content in India over the coming years.

"The Indian market is set to grow exponentially over the next decade and some of the new age content platforms are best positioned to capture this growth," said a RedSeer spokesperson.

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