iWorld
Amazon MX Player sharpens India’s streaming appetite in 2025
India’s streaming audience stopped grazing in 2025 and started choosing with purpose. As viewing shifted from endless scrolling to deliberate selection, Amazon MX Player emerged as one of the year’s biggest winners, marrying familiar franchises with fresh formats and pushing free, mass-market streaming to new highs.
The platform began the year by laying out its ambition at StreamNext, unveiling a slate of more than 100 titles, including 40 Hindi originals, all streaming free. That strategy paid off. Long-running franchises once again anchored viewership, led by Ek badnaam aashram season 3 part 2. Starring Bobby Deol as Baba Nirala, the series crossed 250 million viewers and sat firmly atop Ormax Media charts as India’s most-watched show, puncturing the idea that only paid platforms can deliver scale.
Returning titles such as Half CA season 2, Hunter season 2 with Suniel Shetty and Jackie Shroff, Jamnapaar season 2 and Gutar gu season 3 reinforced the scripted slate, blending high drama with emotional realism. The platform also flexed its range with Bhay: the Gaurav Tiwari mystery, a restrained psychological thriller starring Karan Tacker and Kalki Koechlin that leaned on mood and investigation rather than spectacle.
Reality programming, however, became the year’s breakout engine. Formats grew sharper and more idea-led, turning into social conversations rather than background noise. Rise and fall, hosted by Ashneer Grover and featuring Pawan Singh, Arjun Bijlani, Kiku Sharda and Dhanashree Verma, drew more than 500 million views and ranked among India’s top two reality shows, according to Ormax. Hip hop India season 2, judged by Remo D’Souza and Malaika Arora, topped Ormax reality rankings for 11 consecutive weeks between January and June, while competitive shows such as Battleground and I-POPSTAR deepened the genre mix.
Fresh originals also found space to grow. Creator-led titles such as First copy with Munawar Faruqui and Aukaat ke bahar featuring Elvish Yadav brought new voices to the platform, while youth-focused shows like Lafangey and Gamerlog captured the awkward churn of early adulthood. Alongside domestic content, Amazon MX Player expanded MX Vdesi into one of India’s largest libraries of international dubbed programming, with more than 200 titles across Korean, Turkish and Mandarin, and the arrival of anime hits such as Demon slayer.
The scale attracted brands. Samsung, boAt, Lux Cozi, Haier and Sprite were among the marquee advertisers backing the platform, underlining its appeal as a mass-reach destination. By the end of 2025, Amazon MX Player had crossed 1.4 billion app downloads and reached 250 million monthly active users. With availability spanning Prime Video, Fire TV and the Amazon Shopping App, it closed the year not just as another streaming service, but as a fixture of India’s viewing habit.
In a crowded OTT market, Amazon MX Player’s bet was simple and effective. Make it free, make it familiar, then make it bold. In 2025, that formula made India stream.
iWorld
Airtel crosses 650 million customers to cement its place as world’s second largest telco
The Indian telecoms giant, now spanning 15 countries, is chasing the top spot with satellites, smartphones and mobile money
NEW DELHI: Numbers like these do not come around often. Bharti Airtel has crossed 650 million customers, making it the world’s second largest telecom operator by mobile customer base, according to GSMA Intelligence. Only one rival sits ahead of it. The gap, Airtel intends to close.
Gopal Vittal, executive vice chairman of Bharti Airtel, was characteristically measured. “Achieving the milestone of 650 million customers to be the second largest operator globally is a great responsibility for us to serve our customers better every day,” he said. “Every customer interaction is an opportunity to earn trust and deliver value.”
The scale of the operation is striking. In India, Airtel serves over 368 million mobile customers and was the first operator to launch 5G Plus services. It now reaches over 13 million homes with high-speed internet and a further 15 million households through its Digital TV offering. Its enterprise arm, Airtel Business, runs mission-critical infrastructure across cybersecurity, cloud, IoT and SD-WAN, underpinned by over 400,000 route kilometres of subsea fibre and a string of green data centres. The company has also announced a push into non-banking financial services, using its data insights to offer personalised credit products through the Airtel app.
Africa tells an equally ambitious story. Airtel Africa serves over 179 million customers across 14 countries, with Airtel Money, its mobile financial platform, counting over 52 million users. In a continent where traditional banking remains out of reach for millions, Airtel Money is not a product. It is infrastructure.
Beyond terrestrial networks, Airtel is reaching upward. Partnerships with Eutelsat OneWeb and SpaceX give it access to a constellation of low earth orbit satellites, pushing high-speed, low-latency broadband to remote maritime, aviation and rural areas that cables will never reach.
Airtel’s networks now cover over two billion people across 15 countries. The company that began as an Indian mobile operator has become something rather larger. At 650 million customers and climbing, it is not finished yet.
