In an age where all media conversations are sprinkled with AI, Amazon MX Player’s Karan Bedi, Director and Head of Amazon MX Player, and Amogh Dusad Director and Head of Content, have found particular benefits of AI integration not just in production but also in the advertising stack offered to advertisers.
Following the platform’s integration with Amazon in 2025, the two talk to businessline on how consumer behaviour changes alongside technological progress:
2025 was your first year with Amazon. What were the highlights of the year?
Bedi: We hit and exceeded all our targets on many of the metrics for 2025. On the revenue side, we spent time implementing the platform as part of the Amazon product suite and service stack. More than 450 advertisers came on board across different categories and started taking part in the full funnel solutions that Amazon is offering. We’re the only ones who can reach all the way to the end of the funnel with buying behavior with the shopping signals provided by Amazon Shopping. So, there was major acceptance from top advertisers all the way down to SMEs and beyond across all agencies.
Dusad: We launched more than 150 shows. We are seeing diversity not only in genres but also formats in the consumer landscape. The same consumer is looking for different kind of content. Even our narrative with building advertisers’ stories into our shows saw a lot of success. Our shows like Campus Beats, Heartbeats, Rise and Fall and Battleground brought a lot of brands inside the content, deepening the advertiser partnership where we are offering a full funnel of Amazon solutions, including real shopping and building brands inside the show.
How did you measure the ads integration success?
Dusad: We consider the scale of partnerships. More than 25 to 30 brand integration partnerships are happening across our shows. Then we look at how brands feel about that integration. A lot of brands are coming back on our shows for the future season, like Campus Beats has Samsung on board, Rise and Fall has Amul.
How has AI played a role in terms of your content?
Dusad: We see AI use-cases across our content journey, from simple low hanging use-cases of localisation and dubbing to possibilities of getting multiple languages at much lower cost. The turnaround timelines for VFX bring products to customers much faster and we can now add shows in our portfolio which, without AI, would have made us hesitate. You will see some of those shows and parts come up in our 2026 lineup. AI is finally a tool. It has dropped access barriers. People can access the tool for free to create content but you still need a storyteller.
Do you see it contributing to your revenue in any way meaningfully?
Dusad: Revenue is linked to our ability to keep customers engaged. AI becomes a great advantage to keep them excited.
Bedi: AI is moving out very massively across our entire advertising stack. There are tools available that allow advertisers to create creatives including full video web series etc. So that’s one very major aspect of AI where we at MX are a big beneficiary because video is one of the main areas where this is used. Advertisers who start on Amazon and do more search advertising etc now have the ability to quickly create a web series and roll it out on MX and then create that demand pool on top and go further down the funnel to provide revenue. So that’s one major aspect of AI that is important. There is a huge amount of AI in personalisation, recommend the right things to watch, which adds indirectly to more view time, watch time. On the marketing side, AI tools help get our message out to our customers more easily and more efficiently. So again it’s just more bang for our buck that allows us to then create enough of a pool to monetise better.
Many companies are looking at short-form content. What are your expectations in terms of Fatafat?
Bedi: We’ve taken a very different view on it than most of the competitors. We launched in India, specifically taking the view of saying we are going to go free. There are a bunch of other players in the market of different sizes but they charge for it. Amazon has the full funnel ability across shopping signals, the ad tech that powers all this, the scale that MX brings to the table. So, we have the ingredients for being able to launch an ad-driven microdrama business are unique. We believe free is going to be the largest segment of the market. Microdrama is just at the very beginning of where it can be. This model of scale with free, good quality, premium content and Amazon’s abilities in the advertising space are what will set us apart.
Has your target audience changed in terms of geography or in terms of age?
Dusad: The part that is popping up is more on the gender. The digital universe is almost 70 per cent skewed towards male audiences. Now, we are seeing a very strong acceptance for this content from female customers. It’s the content and also access which every passing quarter is becoming easier. Before, smartphone and data access was more male-skewed but as digital penetration grows you are see more audiences across gender and age groups coming on to digital video consumption.
What’s the game plan for 2026?
Bedi: We are doubling down further on our V-Desi category which continues to be a big driver of new time for us. We’ve got one of our flagship shows Made in India, with Titan coming out soon as well. We are also rolling out games on the MX platform. Amazon Shopping will onboard MX Player as well.
Published on April 3, 2026