As India’s OTT and smart TV market explodes, homegrown players like CloudTV are redefining how users consume content. In an exclusive interview with DeviceNext, Abhijeet Rajpurohit, COO & Co-Founder of CloudTV, reveals the company’s journey from inception to becoming a key OS partner for TV manufacturers. From tackling localization challenges to competing with global giants, he shares insights on India’s evolving streaming landscape, strategic collaborations, and CloudTV’s roadmap to dominate the next wave of connected entertainment.
Here’s the full conversation.
CloudTV’s journey as a platform-agnostic OS for smart TVs is unique. What inspired the founding vision, and how has the journey evolved since inception?
As a company that started off with hardware and software both, CloudTV understood the exact challenges and limitations that the TV market faced. Our OS, CloudTV was built for an inhouse TV brand called CloudWalker TV in 2017. Within two years, we began partnering with other TV manufacturers to provide software solutions for their smart TVs. There was no other Indian OS available in the market and with the growing demand for smart TVs, our credible made-in-India product, CloudTV, resonated well with the Indian TV OEMs. Since then, we have collaborated with more than 100 OTT app partners, 200+ TV brands, and 250+ Fast TV channels across India. Earlier this year we also announced our international partnership with MediaTek and ChangHong.
The vision has expanded since then as we understood other challenges in the industry and the journey strategies evolve depending on the market. We remain committed to solving the needs of the complex TV industry and are pioneering solutions for not just OS needs, but also for the evolving ad tech needs for CTV Advertising in the industry.
With multiple OS options (Android TV, Fire TV, etc.), what key advantages does CloudTV offer to manufacturers, content providers, and end-users?
CloudTV works with manufacturers and brands to provide a much faster go to market period for their products. In a country like ours, we cannot afford to lose time in paperwork and so our solutions are turnkey and faster. One of the biggest differentiators is our compliance with affordable hardware that allows for the device to remain cost-effective for the end consumer. This ties in with our vision of keeping smart TVs affordable in a price sensitive market like India, while providing premium entertainment through our content partnerships.
With a growing CloudTV community, more than 12 million viewers, content providers look at this opportunity for their reach as well. And our partnerships help grow the business together.
The end customer gets the fruit of all the behind-the-scenes workings in the form of a user-friendly, premium UI/UX with all the content they love to watch with ease.
How do you see the Indian OTT market evolving, especially with the rise of hybrid (free+paid) models and regional content? Where does CloudTV fit in?
This market of on-demand streaming is almost reaching maturity in India which means that experimenting of business models will not immediately lead to drop in subscribers or loss of customers, like it would have in an immature market. It’ll be interesting to see this evolution in a market like India and exciting to witness new business models come out of this experiment.
The OTT monetisation model may look something like this in the coming years:
- Hybrid monetization models will dominate with increasingly sophisticated tiering
- AI-driven personalized advertising experiences will improve relevance and reduce friction
- Aggregation and bundling are likely to increase, similar to cable packages but with more flexibility
- Shoppable content and interactive advertising will create new revenue streams
- Regulation of advertising standards specific to OTT may emerge
- The subscription fee is just a loyalty fee, it doesn’t cover up all the costs. Creation of content is a long process, investment, companies need free flowing cash flow which can come from advertisements.
As a company with an India-first approach, we value our regional content partnerships incredibly. CloudTV remains committed to just being a platform with a complete TV ecosystem including a growing scale of certified content partners that keep our users engaged and happy.
CloudTV OS has to be pre-installed by TV brands. How do you work with manufacturers to tailor solutions, and what’s the roadmap for further partnerships?
We are not just a platform but take care of the whole TV viewing ecosystem including providing certified apps and FAST channels also into the OS. So, a turnkey solution to manufacturers where they do not have to worry about any hassles of individual certification of these apps.
We work at the chipset level, which allows for smoother integration of our services into the TV hardware, making it fast and seamless. As for partnerships, our latest was with MediaTek and Changhong earlier this year, while other content and supply chain partnerships continue to grow with time.
India is a price-sensitive market with diverse content preferences. How does CloudTV address localization (language, UI/UX) and affordability for mass adoption?
Our OS is hardware-light, meaning it runs seamlessly on affordable devices, making it a product that most Indians can afford to watch entertainment on. Keeping entertainment affordable and accessible has been one of our key missions.
With a diverse demographic and linguistic needs of the country, we are also constantly evolving our product to cater to these needs. This includes our Voice Assistant which recognises regional languages like Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and more languages coming soon for different regions of the country. This makes content discovery and browsing much easier and familiar.
We also take researched decisions about content partnerships and have many regional OTT apps and FAST channels that cater to our viewers needs.
What’s next for CloudTV—any expansions into new markets, technologies (e.g., AI/ML integrations), or verticals (gaming, education)?
The future is exciting. We’re investing heavily in AI-driven personalization, voice search, and smart content discovery which will also showcase in our upcoming products. We are already in talks with STB providers and integrating CloudTV OS into the hardware to help turn any basic TV into a smart TV. As for expansion in new markets, there is more to explore and we will be announcing some exciting new updates soon!
