Amazon India launches free video streaming service miniTV

Ecommerce giant Amazon’s India arm has launched a video streaming service within its shopping app called miniTV.  

“With the launch of miniTV, Amazon.in shopping app is now a single destination for customers to shop from millions of products, make payments and watch free entertainment videos,” the company said in a blog post. 

The service offers professionally created and curated content across web-series, comedy shows, technology news, food, beauty, fashion and more. miniTV will host non-exclusive aggregated content and include curated content from production houses such as The Viral Fever and Pocket Aces, and individual creators such as Ashish Chanchalani, Akash Gupta and Sejal Kumar, among others.  

With this launch, Amazon has two video entertainment offerings – miniTV and Prime Video. miniTV is completely free and it does not require a separate app.   

miniTV is currently available on Android phones and is expected to be extended to iOS and mobile web over the coming months.  

The announcement of Amazon’s latest video streaming service comes months after the government notified rules for over-the-top (OTT) video streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

The new set of rules, finalised by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), seek to regulate social media platforms as intermediaries and digital media and OTT streaming platforms in the country. 

The rules also mandate video streaming services to accept complaints from viewers through a designated grievance redressal officer, who is required to process the complaint and decide on the complaints within 15 days.