Wish to see your favourite scene from Bollywood blockbuster Amar Akbar Anthony ? Or the action-packed sequence from the film Shiva where Nagarjuna pulls off the bicycle chain to bash up a group of villains? Now, you can watch your favourite 15 minutes of a film in Yahoo’s Movieplex that has recently introduced a special section of mini-movies.

Mini-movies feature the best 15 minutes of a film. This category has 25 films at present. Yahoo India is looking at leveraging this space and adding more movies in this segment.

In the large format, Yahoo Movieplex has access to thousands of movies as part of their arrangement with production houses. “The contract gives us rights to keep the content for certain duration. All the deals are on a revenue-sharing basis and the split varies from deal to deal,” said Nitin Mathur, Senior Director, Marketing, Yahoo India.

So how does Yahoo cope with the competition in this space? Mathur feels Yahoo’s innovation lies in the high quality of the videos and specific promotions. “We recently did a special promotion of nine Vidhu Vinod Chopra movies that we featured on the Yahoo Home Page. This increases consumer engagement and also presents advertising opportunities for us,” said Mathur.

According to a KPMG report, digital advertising is expected to expand at a compounded annual growth rate of 30 per cent to Rs 5,700 crore in 2018. Mathur said that this growth would be reflected across all segments in the online advertising space, especially Bollywood and sports such as cricket.

“Advertiser interest in Movieplex is quite significant. We have advertisers such as Maruti Suzuki, Procter & Gamble and LG who have come on board as sponsors. We are looking at more advertisers for this segment,” he added.

At present, Yahoo India is also looking to increase its database in news content, television shows apart from movies and mini-movies categories and expand its mobile traffic.

“We are in a phase where we want to make all our content available on different platforms. Right now, the Yahoo Movieplex can be accessed on android tablets,” Mathur said. Yahoo cricket, its other popular segment, is available on iPhone and Android platforms.

But has mobile traffic picked up? “In certain categories, mobile traffic is getting closer to web traffic, which is around 40 per cent. For instance, our product like Yahoo Cricket, mobile traffic is fairly close to the web,” he said. ICC World Cup was one the best examples of this, he said. Events such as Budget and Elections also bring in a lot of traffic, he added.

nivedita.ganguly@thehindu.co.in

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW