With no live news, are OTTs on the losing side?
Experts who weighed in on the matter opine that losses won't be only on the OTT side
Driven by the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, the year gone by created a tremendous surge in online news viewership that reached 454 million unique visitors across platforms like news websites and OTTs. With OTT players opting out of live news, much is being said on news broadcasters losing out on revenue and reach. Experts say that the loss may be equal on both sides.
In the wake of the intermediary guidelines and the foreign direct investment (FDI) cap, OTT platforms particularly the ones that have foreign ownership, are planning to discontinue their live news service.
Players like SonyLIV have already removed the category from their bouquet of offerings. But in the process, they stand to lose out on the extra stickiness and engagement that news drives as a category.
“News as a genre has more stickiness than entertainment especially in the present times when news is the only category that has fresh content every day. A lot of viewers, who use smart TV at home visit OTT platforms for news thereby making the category a viewership driver for the platform,” said a senior marketing executive of a trilingual news channel.
ZEE in its Annual Report 2020 mentioned how the introduction of news live stream on ZEE5 helped them gain both stickiness and revenue. The report says “ZEE has introduced live news channels on the platform. This has ensured that a varied customer base, including all possible consumer demographics, is covered at the same time. Your Company has ensured that monetization of assets is included in server-side ad insertion on live news streams. This is in addition to pre-roll and mid-rolls ad insertion for video-on-demand assets.” ZEE5 is home to news from 40+ channels.
As per an EY report released in March 2021, ComScore data for December 2020 showed the reach of online video viewers at 468 million, online news at 454 million and online entertainment at 450 million clearly indicating the reach of news is higher than that of entertainment. Online news subscribers also grew between December 2019 and 2020 to reach over 450 million across mobile and desktop users of news sites, portals and aggregators.
“The consumer is also not restricted to one paper, channel or OTT platform any longer, but reads or watches many sites based on who has the latest news or live coverage. With everyone from news platforms, to telecom operators and also e-commerce platforms offering news, we lose out on the huge traffic news would draw on high-decibel events when we remove the category from out platforms,” said the marketing official of a popular OTT platform.
“If the online news viewer doesn’t get his preferred news content on OTT it will only lead to more downloading of news apps, which is a better prospect for us. While we stand to lose the fixed deal amounts, we are paid by aggregator platforms annually. We can generate revenues by driving the same traffic to our own on and off platforms,” said the head of another news channel based out of Mumbai.
