Docubay is at an exciting phase of growth and expansion in 2022
By Girish Dwibhashyam, VP – Strategy, DocuBay
Every dark cloud has a silver lining.
The last two years have presented an opportunity amid adversity and human tragedy, for the OTT industry. Working from home hasn’t had any impact on the operations of the streaming business. On the contrary, these years ensured gain in viewership at a faster pace than earlier, due to people staying indoors and with no other source of entertainment available due to the lockdown(s), which is evident from the fact that OTT revenues in India grew by 26% in FY20 as per the KPMG report.
The adoption of streaming content across genres expedited during this time, and that in a sense has brought about a different business agenda for 2022.
As we step into the new-normal world of 2022, let’s explore a few trends one needs to keep in mind.
User Engagement and Retention – For many streaming services, user engagement and retention have become a higher priority than user acquisition. As subscribers and users, who latched on to OTT in the last two years, have now started stepping out and spending more time offline and on other mediums, resulting in higher churn for many platforms.
User Acquisition – Aggregator platforms like Amazon Channels, Telco or ISP, or even standalone bundles will be one of the main focuses for gaining new customers at faster speed and in larger numbers for many in the coming months. This is partly also because the plethora of options for consumers has increased the customer acquisition cost and made effective marketing more challenging.
Content curation – With technology advancement, the discovery of content using AI and ML will take precedence over manual curation with the volume of content reaching new highs on streaming services.
Content Production – Since a lot of experimental content was released over the last few years, fine-tuning with a focus on what kind of content to produce or acquire using learnings from data of these years will be more critical.
Managing the cost of content – Getting the right talent will be a task with so much competition bidding for the same pool of talent. As per a report from the UK-based firm Purely Streamonomics, $250 billion is estimated to be spent across the globe for content in FY21 with an already 25% increase seen in FY20.
For streaming business, these are just a handful of areas of focus among many. Audience demand for documentary content is seeing unprecedented growth. Docubay is at an exciting phase of growth and expansion; we look forward to 2022 with a lot of enthusiasm and possibilities.
