Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

The most obvious first question, if you’re not one of those city snobs who asks WHAT an MX Player is, is WHY. But let’s start with the basics. 

Over the weekend, TechCrunch reported that Amazon was looking to buy out the wildly popular Times Internet-owned OTT platform MX Player. The price is unknown, and the story ended with a warning from the publication’s sources—a deal may not materialise.

My own sources in MX and Times Internet both confirmed to me that there has been interest from Amazon, and that there have been discussions between the two firms, but I couldn’t get any more details.

So for now, let’s not think about whether the deal will come through. Instead, let’s ask: why? Why would Amazon want to throw money at yet another OTT platform when it already has two of them? And also (here you go, city snobs), what exactly is an MX Player?

By now, I think you’ve got an inkling that people not recognising the platform is a pet peeve of this particular OTT reporter. And that’s partly because MX Player is actually pretty huge—considered the biggest OTT player in India in terms of monthly active users (MAU). 

As of early last year, it reportedly had 280 million MAUs, and it continues to be the top Indian OTT platform in MAU terms as of last month, per data.ai (formerly App Annie). And in the last quarter of 2022, MX Player was the fifth-most downloaded video streaming platform in the world, joining the likes of TikTok, YouTube, and Netflix in the top five. 

So yeah, it’s a bit like asking an Indian sports journalist who Virat Kohli is.

But a lot of people also remember the app from long before it got into streaming. In an earlier avatar, MX Player was a wildly popular video player for pre-downloaded content on phones, almost like a VLC player for your phone, developed by South Korean app developer J2 Interactive. In 2018, Indian news and entertainment giant Times Group bought a majority of the platform for a cool US$140 million and then relaunched it as an OTT platform. 

MX Player’s popularity as an offline video-watching app set it up for future dominance: at the time of the Times acquisition, over 175 million people reportedly used the app at least once a month. The new owner built on that success, and by 2019, Chinese internet giant Tencent was leading a US$111 million investment round into the firm.

Okay, so MX Player is successful.