Much like consumer goods companies, Hooq is planning a big Diwali push with the launch of an advertising and marketing campaign. Except that unlike consumer products, Hooq is an OTT service. OTT, or over-the-top, content in broadcasting refers to delivery of audio, video and other media over the Internet.

Giving the lowdown on Asia’s first premium video-on-demand service, Krishnan Rajagopalan, chief content and distribution officer at Hooq, says the USP of the platform is that it has exclusive content and is advertising-free. It has a catalogue of 6,000 Indian films, to which it will add another 2,000 soon. It has Hollywood films and television content exclusive to the platform. Its portfolio here is quite distinct from the content it hawks in the Philippines and Thailand. Indian households can register multiple devices for the service and the company has the download rights for films: so if your streaming quality is poor, you can download the film and watch it offline.

Singapore-based Hooq is a joint venture between SingTel, Sony Pictures Television and Warner Brothers that has invested millions of dollars in film libraries and other content.

To be sure, the OTT landscape in the country is set to get more competitive with the impending launch of Netflix and Amazon. Newspaper reports indicate that the two global entertainment service brands are likely to enter India soon. While Netflix is eyeing a 2016 launch, Amazon is in talks for content tie-ups in the Indian market. A CNBC report said Netflix, the American on-demand Internet streaming service, has already made its debut in Japan, its first market in Asia, with Japanese telecom and Internet giant Softbank Group.

The entry of these players is expected to shake up the broadcasting market in the country as eyeballs from linear television shift to the OTT brands. In the US, the impact of such a churn on media stocks was for all to see. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal wrote about big media companies that reported a “flurry of disappointing earnings amid concerns about the shift away from traditional television”. The performance of companies such as Viacom and Walt Disney reflected the fear of consumers shifting from television to the Internet. The change in media consumption habits was taking place faster than expected.

The same may not be true of India as yet, but media consumption is gradually moving in a similar direction. Salil Kapoor, chief operating officer at Zee group’s DTH company Dish TV, says cord-cutting in the US has been massive. In India, too, viewers will slowly have a choice of OTT platforms in addition to traditional cable and DTH. The launch of 4G will go in favour of OTT, he says. Cord-cutting refers to viewers cancelling their television subscriptions or taking slimmer packages in favour of broadband Internet.

With an eye on the future, broadcasters such as Zee, Sony and Star have already launched their online streaming products—Ditto, Sony Liv and Hotstar, respectively. Currently, they are more like extensions of the broadcasting companies’ linear channels, but Hotstar promises to serve original content online.

According to Media Partners Asia (MPA), currently, online video/OTT subscription in India is small: $7 million in 2014. By 2018, this figure will touch $26 million. MPA is an independent consulting and information services firm focused on media, communications and entertainment industries.

Despite the visible action, challenges remain—foremost is the connectivity issue. OTT cannot be a mass service because of that, Rajagopalan admits, adding that Hooq still wanted to launch to get the first-mover advantage and give itself a runway before others joined the party.

MPA vice-president Mihir Shah points to other issues: while there is an uptake for English content in India, the broader market still consumes a lot of local regional and Hindi content at significantly lower pay-TV ARPU, or average revenue per user. Also, unlike in the US, the fixed broadband infrastructure in India still remains low at 6% of television households, and less than 10% of Internet users have speeds of more than 4 megabits per second (Mbps). This currently limits the experience of premium video content.

That is not all. The cost of broadband is still quite high for subscribers to switch from linear pay-TV services. Structurally, at 60% TV household penetration, India continues to add 30 million new potential viewers each year. Television, relative to other media, should therefore continue to offer the highest reach to advertisers, Shah adds.

In this flux, measuring new, complex media for advertisers is becoming the greater challenge. The lines between screens—television and others—are blurring, especially for the digital natives. Who is watching what, where and ascribing a value to that is the biggest challenge in measurement today, according to Dominic Proctor, president, GroupM Global. There is an urgent need for measurement models that can go across screens rather than vertical models that do not compare apples with apples, he adds.

Hooq, being an advertising-free platform, isn’t worried.