Amazon has agreed to acquire MX Player as part of its strategy to expand its portfolio in India’s thriving market for video streaming services.

MX Player will add to Amazon's existing video services like Prime Video and MiniTV. The US technology giant is expected to retain the MX Player brand post the acquisition.

“We are always looking for ways to introduce new products and services that help improve customers’ lives. We’re excited to continue to entertain India with the great local originals and exclusive content available across our Prime Video and MiniTV services in India,” said a spokesperson for Amazon India.

The deal concluded on Wednesday, people in the know said, valuing MX Player at $50-100 million.

Karan Bedi, CEO, MX Player, is likely to join Amazon as part of the transaction, people said.

Amazon did not disclose the size of the acquisition. A spokesperson for Times Internet did not comment.

MX Player is one of the top video streaming apps in India with a 15% market share in terms of monthly active users as of April, according to a UBS report.

The video streaming platform is owned by Times Internet, the digital arm of The Times of India Group, which also publishes The Economic Times.

While Amazon’s Prime Video is for subscribers of its Prime programme, MiniTV is free for all users.

The acquisition of MX Player is Amazon’s bid to tap new users with the aim of helping them transact and shop on the platform.

Amazon has been looking to expand its user base in India, drawing customers in non-metro markets. ET had reported last year that Sony was also in talks to acquire MX Player.

Reliance’s Jio Cinema, and Netflix are among the other leading platforms in India. Hotstar has been absorbed by Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries following the mega merger of Viacom18 and Walt Disney India in March this year.

Times Internet had acquired MX Player in 2018. In 2022, Times Internet sold short-video platform MX Takatak to vernacular social media platform ShareChat.

Bengaluru: Bringing Amitabh Bachchan’s voice to Alexa involved two huge technological challenges for Amazon. The voice had to sound exactly like Bachchan’s, since it’s a voice that Indians recognise only too well. As Manoj Sindhwani, vice-president of Alexa Speech at Amazon, says, “My mom’s a big fan of Mr Bachchan. I was worried that if there was even a single flaw, I would not hear the end of it.”

This was further complicated, Sindhwani says, by the manner in which Bachchan speaks — it’s extremely rich, and he speaks with a lot of emotion, intonation. That’s hard for text-to-speech voice systems to perfect. The second big challenge was to use ‘Amit ji’ as the wake word. Wake word is the word you use to activate Alexa.

We’ll know how well Amazon solved these issues only when people start using ‘Amit ji’ on a large scale. Inside Amazon, they are delighted with what they have accomplished. Bachchan is only the fourth celebrity, and the first outside the US, to be part of the Alexa voice feature. The first celebrity voice used was that of American actor Samuel L Jackson, which was launched in December 2019.

The work with Bachchan involved tech teams in India, Poland, the UK and the US, and the actor recording his voice across many sessions, so that the artificial intelligence (AI) systems could then work on it.

Puneesh Kumar, country leader for Alexa in Amazon India, says — to the amusement of all at the company — a sound engineer in Poland is on a first-name basis with Bachchan, given all the interactions they had.