We foresee the next wave of growth to come from Tier 2 & 3 cities: Manish Kalra, ZEE5
ZEE5's Chief Business Officer noted that the platform’s original and language content has seen a rise in popularity this year. The platform had forayed into Punjabi market this September
ZEEL-owned video streaming platform ZEE5 expects the next wave of viewership growth to come from Tier 2 and 3 cities due to its strategy of investing in regional content in languages like Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Bengali. It had recently forayed into the Punjabi market.
Manish Kalra, Chief Business Officer, ZEE5 India, said that the platform’s original and language content has seen an incremental rise in popularity this year. ZEE5 hosts 2 lakh+ hours of on-demand content, 100+ live TV channels, 140+ originals across languages like Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, and Punjabi.
“At ZEE5, our viewership comes from every town of India, and we foresee the next wave of growth to come from Tier 2 & 3 cities looking for diversity in original content. We forayed into Punjabi-speaking markets in September this year and witnessed a 2X growth with our tent poles in the language receiving an overwhelming response. Malayalam content also worked very well on the platform,” Kalra told e4m.
He noted that the Indian OTT market was a nascent category before the pandemic. However, it has become mainstream post the pandemic. "One of the biggest trends this year has been big-ticket direct-to-digital releases, like Radhe, Rashmi Rocket, Bob Biswas for us at ZEE5, and many others in the industry. We saw a healthy pipeline of movies releasing on OTT platforms, giving rise to hybrid releases, a trend we foresee continuing even in the future," he added.
To democratise access to content, OTT platforms have revised their subscription rates. ZEE5, Kalra noted, had launched the ‘Dekhtey Reh Jaogey’ campaign that provided the audience an annual premium subscription at Rs. 499 per year. He also stated that the OTT industry is continuously evolving monetisation models due to the rapid growth of digital content consumption.
“While AVOD remains the primary source of monetization for OTT players in the country, SVOD and Freemium models are picking up the momentum, largely on the back of cutting-edge content. At ZEE5, we continue to work on a hybrid model (SVOD + AVOD). With the audience constantly on the lookout for captivating and entertaining content, we believe in continuously ramping up our bouquet of offerings with real, relevant, and resonant stories to ensure there is something for everyone at ZEE5, across our AVOD and SVOD platforms,” Kalra stated.
ZEE5 has seen an uptick in its paid subscriber base due to the strategic mix of offering tent pole content and blockbuster releases, especially in regional languages. Furthermore, the platform has introduced a property called ZEE5 Intelligence Monitor to engage with marketers. The report seeks to highlight the dominant trends in consumer behaviour across several top sectors in India on the back of ZEE5’s rich repository of a highly engaged pan-India user base.
“This property was designed to aid advertisers to get the right insights into the minds of the consumers to make well-equipped business decisions, hence creating further recall for our AVOD offerings to marketers,” Kalra informed.
OTT platforms had seen widespread adoption in 2020 due to the pandemic. That momentum continued in 2021 as well. “Last year during the lockdown we grew 200% with a steadily stabilizing subscriber base. Like last year, we’ve been seeing significant year-on-year as well as quarter-on-quarter growth in our viewership numbers,” Kalra said.
As of the quarter ending in September 2021, ZEE5’s global monthly active users (MAUs) stand at 93.2 million, and global daily active users (DAUs) stand at 9.3 million with a watch time of 186 minutes.
Speaking about the key trends, Kalra said that the pandemic-induced growth in demand for quality content has led to an increased focus on storytelling across languages leading to the creation of extensive and expansive content libraries.
“People also became more open to sampling diverse content from different languages and were eager to opt for the living room experience, thanks to the increased adoption of connected devices. This growth of the connected devices ecosystem has made OTT a preferred choice not only for personal but also for family consumption,” he stated.
Kalra claimed that ZEE5 has seen a 3X growth in the viewership on connected devices thanks to the rise in dynamic storytelling. He further stated that the growth in the number of connected devices has led to the advent of 'Home Box Office', a trend that is here to stay. He averred that the growth of the connected devices ecosystem has made OTT a preferred choice for personal and family consumption.
