Eros Now has been bullish on the next 500 million users coming from an instant internet entertainment revolution of middle India.
Rishika Lulla Singh, CEO, Eros Now Digital shares her Focus areas for 2020.
TECHNOLOGY
Technology is one of our key focus areasin 2020 and the reason why this is important is because according to a KPMG report, the next 1 Billion internet users in India are going to be coming from tier II, tier III cities and rural India. Internet penetration has essentially been growing 60% year on year. How does Eros Now attempt to acquire that demographic and population is by having a robust technology which can serve people content and the video experience in a highly localized, personalized manner. So technology is one of the key focuses for us on how to essentially capture that audience.
CONTENT
Another key focus for usis to capture the audience with our content.Over the past one year we have released a slew of original pieces of content that have actually gained critical acclaim, but they have been more Hindi focused and a little bit more sophisticated in nature. So how do we ensure the content that we create to target middle India and target the next 1 billion internet users.The plan we have on the original side is to actually start diversifying into regional original. How do we continue to ensure that the originals we put out are varied in terms of genre, how are they actually ready to serve not just linguistically. So that’s incredibly important to us to continue to put out a robust pipeline of original content across our categories such as quickies short form, and long form original.
PARTNERSHIPS
And other kinds of key category for us as well or key pillar of importance in order to achieve this 500 million target as user base is to ensure that we have strong partnerships. We believe that in order to successfully create a subscriber basis scale, collaboration and partnerships are incredibly important. 2019 essentially saw us setting up a lot of the groundwork to ensure that we can flourish in 2020 in that department.
A couple of the partnerships that are key and instrumental, for example that will be going live and in time, the new year is an Apple Partnership, a partnership where we are the only non-newest player to be bundled in the Apple fast subscription worldwide. That’s the key importance to us and that systems demonstration of how we believe that partnerships help us lead.Arecent partnership we did with the Google YouTube bundle, at Eros Now we believe that is going to be a key driver for us to actually start as well gaining subscriber momentum and to grow our subscriber universe. So successful partnerships essentially form the third key pillars for us that that we’re focused on in 2020.
CULTURE
It’s important for us to actually define the external culture of what people are watching and how they’re consuming it. So in order to define that again, technology, content, partnerships funnel into this category. But actually ensuring the tonality of the platform and the brand can define this culture within India today. We have a strong social media following which will leverage which we help us define a lot of that culture beyond just content we’re putting out there and the kind of pillar is more for internal finance from an organization perspective.
The need from culture as well, is, we think it’s really important to set a strong culture within an organization and culturally how do you bridge that gap? At Eros now it is important for us to try and let us be seen as a leader in defining what culture.
