From a strong 2021 towards a stronger 2022
By Manish Kalra, Chief Business Officer, ZEE5 India
The media and entertainment industry, especially digital video streaming, has been having its moment under the sun since 2020. An entire industry has collectively witnessed a decade’s worth of advancements in a short span of two years, and we are on the precipice of taking the strides we’ve made and charting out a future of even stronger disruption. 2020 was the year of many firsts for the industry and 2021 was the year of levelling up. As the year draws to a close, here are 5 focus areas ZEE5 intends to build on to ensure 2022 is many steps forward, not just for ZEE5 but also for the sector.
Content as the North Star. Always.
ZEE5 being a consumer-driven platform believes in having a pulse over what our viewers want to watch. We have identified 100+ consumer taste clusters and in our aim to deliver the most dynamic, premium content, we streamed tentpole properties including Bob Biswas, Friends: The Reunion, Radhe, Break Point, Rashmi Rocket and more all through 2021. It has been an honour for us to bring to our audience bespoke and compelling content right at the tap of a button, within the comfort of their homes. And we want to keep telling meaningful stories by consistently delivering content that is Real, Relevant, and Resonant. With this in mind, we are partnering with passionate creators and remarkable content powerhouses to create a robust pipeline so that we can continue entertaining our viewers.
We will also focus on creating original content in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Bengali, with a special focus on family entertainment. Regional will continue to be the growth driver. In terms of content investments, 50% will go into original shows and 50% will go into acquisitions, primarily films and other shows. Content will continue to be king and diversity of content is only going to grow. At ZEE5, through our ability to deliver multilingual purposeful content across various devices, ecosystems, and operating systems, we have successfully introduced our audiences to a world of stories from the heartland. And we will continue to strengthen our forte of being the multilingual storyteller for multiple entertainment seekers.
India and Bharat – on one platform a.k.a. Entertainment Inclusion
With a concerted focus on ‘Deeper Regionalization’, ZEE5 has always stood for empowering Indians to consume entertainment anytime and anywhere. Our primary objective is to drive ‘Entertainment Inclusion’, by onboarding millions of digital consumers and democratizing access to bespoke Indian entertainment for all, especially for markets which are new/underserved.
We have been inching closer to this target riding on two key waves – a) bolstering our content library with stories in multiple vernacular languages and b) through value driven partnerships with ecosystem enablers. For the former, we foresee the next wave of growth to come from Tier II and III cities looking for diversity in original content and genres. While the big cities will have a definite influence, the larger share of the pie will come in from smaller markets over time. For the latter, we have been strategically associating with ecosystem partners for greater reach and last mile connectivity, especially in Tier 2 and 3 cities.
Our intent with these investments is to make deeper inroads into the country to offer compelling content to our audience base and acquire new users, providing them with an unlimited and instant access to our premium content library, thereby unlocking unparalleled scale and reach across 28 states and 8 union territories of India.
Enhanced app experience for higher customer retention
Our customer is at the heart of everything we do and hence, our focus has always been to enhance our tech stack and provide high quality video and best-in-class content viewing experience across devices, ecosystems, and operating systems. India is a unique market, and the penetration of smartphones and low-cost data has been advantageous for the OTT ecosystem. Further, on the back of our partnership with international cloud players, our audiences are able to stream data even across low bandwidth areas. In fact, what we’ve also observed is that audiences in these regions, instead of only streaming the content, are also leveraging the downloading feature to watch it as per their convenience.
At the same time, with the advent of smart TVs, today, 60-65% of content consumption is coming from connected TVs which is a testament to Indians gradually moving from mobile-only time to family time. At ZEE5, we’re focusing on enhancing the video watching experience on connected TVs, what we call the ‘Home Box Office’. By the virtue of a dedicated team on the backend, we have been working to help build a strong cohort of design, tech, data and talent to cater to the new-age consumer seamlessly.
Be the first choice for brands and advertisers
ZEE5 possesses a rich repository of a highly engaged user base from across India and Bharat and has a strong pulse on consumer trends. By leveraging our market intelligence to decrypt and analyse consumer-focused trends, observations, and insights across various categories which witnessed a demand upswing in the new normal, we have been aiming to offer our advertiser partners a multi-dimensional understanding of traditional and emerging product categories, coupled with insights into the minds of consumers and to effectively drive targeted engagement, combat ambiguity and boost smarter business decisions. One such initiative has been ZEE5’s Intelligence Monitor, a fortnightly knowledge series that studies its audience, their consumption patterns, and the latest trends, among others for the benefit of the advertisers.
We also announced massive line-ups for enabling advertisers to enhance brand engagement using personalised tech and data enabled cohorts and interest clusters to empower brands to increase their market share across categories. And will continue to make ZEE5 a sought-after platform for advertisers, driving strong value proposition for them.
Global foray
2021 was the year we made our big global foray into the US. Officially the world’s largest streaming service for South Asian content, ZEE5 was launched in a mega event held in the US by none other than the multi-hyphenate Priyanka Chopra via a global campaign themed ‘Welcome to South Asia: Stories from our world’. Cementing our position as leaders, ZEE5 currently brings 170,000 hours of on-demand entertainment from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to 190+ countries, making us the only OTT /streaming platform with such a massive geo-presence. Additionally, as a key ‘Local for Local’ initiative, we even launched a range of Bangladeshi Originals for its audiences across the globe. Going forward, we will continue to build our content library across the six international languages of Malay, Thai, Bahasa, Urdu, Bangla and Arabic, ensuring ZEE5 continues to make the best South Asian stories easily accessible to the world.
As we crystal-ball gaze into 2022, one thing is for sure – we at ZEE5 will continue to build onto our goal of strengthening our foray into the Indian OTT landscape. We are India’s largest home-grown video streaming platform and multilingual storyteller for multiple entertainment seekers, and we aim to continue telling stories which matter. Stories which bring the country together.
