By: Yohan P Chawla
On an evening led by multiple announcements, celebrations and the successful completion of three years in the business, Viacom18’s OTT platform, Voot, had quite a lot in store for the audience comprising of select trade, tech and business media.
Viacom18 celebrated 100 billion minutes of watch time on VOOT. They also announced a content line up of 30+ new VOOT originals and launched VOOT studios – a business performance-oriented content tech solution for advertisers looking to connect with digital audiences through branded shows, sponsorships and interactive formats in addition to other bespoke solutions.
In his opening remarks, Sudhanshu Vats, Group CEO and MD, Viacom 18, said, “OTT watch time has been doing phenomenally well in our journey of 3 years, and has grown at 8X. It has been completely fueled and enabled by what has been said many times – availability, accessibility and affordability. I think the Jio revolution, the way the entire data prices have come down, and making India the cheapest data market in the world allows more and more Indians to access, afford and use data. I think that is first the big story.”
Setting the roadmap ahead, Vats said, “We are the 2nd largest OTT platform in the country and are celebrating 100 billion minutes of watch time on VOOT. This is something which we take with pride and as a challenge as well. From a 100 billion minutes of watch time which we have achieved, our next destination is to achieve a 100 million monthly active users in this fiscal year.”
VOOT will soon be diversified into four different offerings, first, the currently running AVOD model; second, VOOT Kids, a premium kids’ content service with e-books, audio books and gaming etc – which is currently in beta testing and is expected to be launched in a few months’ time; third, VOOT shall be available to audiences in USA (in fact it already has been launched in UK in partnership with Virgin). And last, the freemium model of VOOT which will be launched soon, rounded off the diversification plans for the platform.
Akash Banerji, Head – AVOD Business, Voot, spoke about the internal audience management network called MAVARIC which the platform has created. “MAVARIC, essentially manages audiences at VOOT through activation and data enrichment. In simple words, it transforms big data into actionable consumer insights and further segments them into more than 1000+ odd consumer segments that a brand and an advertiser can actually choose from.”
Banerji also mentioned a few consumption trends and pointed out the fact that more and more women have been consuming content on VOOT and that women audiences have increased to 53% in the year 2018, hence explaining the importance of segmentation of product offerings.
A new hashtag, #NonStopNew is VOOT’s new mantra. To elaborate on the same, Banerji, said to Medianews4u , “We are a digital video and a digital-first brand, and we are operating in a category accelerated by technology where things are constantly changing and evolving including consumers’ tastes and preferences and also the different ways of operating your businesses.”
“The only truth in this new world is that if one doesn’t change, one shall perish. To really live up to that promise and not just as a fake war cry, which is something we are already doing on our platform. A whole host of new and differentiated things that we are offering to consumers and advertisers alike and hence the proposition that VOOT is a platform a brand and is always up to something new, hence #NonStopNew, ” Banerji said.
