video on demand. Inside the content factory at Voot

There’s big change sweeping through Voot, the two-year-old Over the Top (OTT) video platform of Viacom 18. It is shifting models from free to freemium. It is altering its content mix, making some big-bang investments in creating Originals. It is going International, launching in the UK later this year. In parallel, it is going aggressively regional as well.

“People are willing to pay for compelling and binge-worthy stories,” asserts Sudhanshu Vats, the dynamic MD of Viacom 18, on the shift to freemium. So Voot, which till now was running primarily on catch-up content and a bit of value-added content from the extensive Viacom library (that boasts shows from Colors, Rishtey, MTV, etc), is now trying to create original, digital, binge-worthy content.

To start with, it has announced 18 original multi-lingual web series cutting across genres ranging from crime to comedy, romcoms to relationship dramas in languages ranging from Hindi, Tamil to Kannada. A lot of thought has gone into this selection.

It is launching kids content that will be behind a paywall. And its international piece will also be behind a paywall.

Tipping point

Voot’s sudden shift of gears is not surprising. OTT consumption in India has hit tipping point and is set to climb phenomenally. Online video audience is currently estimated to be around 250 million, according to KPMG’s 2018 report on the media & entertainment industry, ‘Media Ecosystems: The Walls Fall Down.’ Vats projects it will be 750 million by 2020, riding on smartphone penetration, increasing geographical coverage of high-speed data and reducing rate of data. The tsunami of content unleashed by various OTT players is another factor in the growth.

Both Vats, and Monika Shergill, Head of Content, Viacom 18 Digital Ventures, stress that more important than the audience size is the watch time — the amount of time a person spends on your platform. Currently, this hovers at 30-50 minutes for premium OTT platforms and around 8 to 12 minutes for platforms like YouTube. (Premium OTT is defined as those with created curated content while user generated platforms like YouTube are non-premium)

If you have binge-worthy content, then the watch time increases. That explains the plethora of content deals being sewn by the OTT players. Competition is intense. And the race to create compelling content is furious. Global OTT players Netflix and Amazon Prime have taken a lead in creating original Indian content.

But network-driven OTTs have not been idle either. Zee5, SonyLiv and Hotstar have been busy creating their own niches — the latter two more sports-focussed. Viacom’s Voot had so far relied on the channel’s vast entertainment library though it has innovated on catch-up content by releasing and packaging uncut content from some of its blockbuster shows like Bigg Boss. But as advertising rates plummet thanks to oversupply of inventory and the need to shift to a subscription model becomes imperative (see chart), the time to act is now.

Voot’s series of announcements are hence bang on time.

Why originals matter

One would think that in the long run, the networks riding on the enormous library of content they have with them, thanks to their TV channels, would hold an advantage. But Girish Menon – Partner and Head, Media and Entertainment at KPMG in India, thinks otherwise. “It may be argued that due to the large library of TV content, broadcasters currently have more to offer to consumers, but in the long run, platforms that can appeal to the ever expanding OTT audiences, with content tailored to their tastes and language, will hold an advantage,” he says.

Now with that context in mind, let’s look at Voot’s new programming mix. Currently Voot has 50,000 hours of catch-up content up already on its platform. Going forward, says Vats, the aim will be to have a mix of 60 per cent catch-up content, and 40 per cent of Exclusives + Originals.

A lot is, thus, riding on the Exclusives and Originals. So what has gone into the selection and commissioning of these originals? “Gut, data, gut,” says Shergill. She insists that though they have reams of data on viewership habits, the genres that click and so on, it’s ultimately gut that influences selection. Gut enables experimentation too.

However, data goes on to define the scale and budget of these shows. “Data cannot help me in greenlighting the stories I want to tell, but it will help me define target size, ticket size, and scale,” says Shergill. So, the content team at Voot, which includes data scientists, has sifted through reams of analytics to figure out patterns.

There are three sets of data that Voot relies on, says Shergill. The most valuable is, of course, those of registered users, since you get a clear profile of the viewer.

But a lot of inferred data can be obtained from the unregistered users as well, based on their surfing behaviour. And then there is the industry data obtained from third-party sources that helps Voot in benchmarking against competition. Internally, it has its own audience measurement tool called MAVARIC. Using data, platforms can personalise content and tailor originals to the taste and language of loyal users to keep them glued.

The content creators have had to keep in mind another factor. So far, OTT consumers have been urban audiences with whom niche content works.

Next wave of users

But now the next wave of users are coming from all over the country, so content has to become mass now. Ask Vats how they will cater to mass, and he says, “Some people come for stories, some follow the stars. We have both.” Bollywood personalities do figure in the Voot originals, in talk shows like ‘Feet up with the stars’ as well as in some of the drama series.

Vats also points out that regional is the new national and the next wave of users will be coming out of vernacular mediums. Hence four of the upcoming Originals are in regional languages, three in Tamil, where the second biggest chunk of online video consumption happens, after Hindi.

As Menon of KPMG says “Regional content is expected to play a pivotal role in providing a competitive advantage to whichever platform cracks it the best.” He cites a KPMG Google Report of 2017, which says 9 out of 10 incremental internet users in India are expected to be language users (non-English), with 536 million language (non-English) internet subscribers expected by 2021. “In addition to language, the audience today also seeks local cultural nuances in the content they consume,” he says.

However, others are thinking on the same lines. Amazon Prime has sewn up original content deals for Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi. Also, regional OTT players, like HoiChoi in Bengali and SunNxt in Tamil, have sprung up. So Voot has to be agile.

Competition is intense. But both Vats and Shergill sound confident of cracking the content puzzle. Shergill says, right now all the OTT platforms have different personalities. “Each of the platforms have different personalities and goals,” she says. “India is an ‘and’ country,” sums up Vats, pointing out that there is room for all, especially as all our screens — cinema, TV and digital — are under-indexed.

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