ZEE5 aspires to be in the top 2 or 3 in the OTT space, says CEO Tarun Katial

ZEE5, Zee Group’s over-the-top (OTT) platform, aspires to “always be in the top two or three in this game”, apart from aiming to be the entertainment super app in the country, said Tarun Katial, CEO, ZEE5 India.

“The core of all of this is digital video, with the 60 crore addressable audience in the country. There are two ends ― the advertisement-funded end, and the subscription end, and we want to make sure that we have as many use cases of digital video, both on the advertisement side as well as the subscription side,” Katial told BusinessLine , talking about the company’s ambition to be India’s entertainment super app. He pointed out that Indian phones are not compatible to run multiple applications, whilst also adding that Indian consumers are divided between content on the advertisement-funded and the subscription ends.

ZEE, with its multiple use cases, has always been a large conglomerate in entertainment in the country, and ZEE5 is its replica in the digital world, said Katial.

ZEE5 has released more than 100 original shows since its inception in February 2018. It plans to add another 70-80 this year. It has also entered new segments like education and music, as well as partnered with news channels across the country. It will also be developing a short-form content platform called Hypershots, content for kids, as well as gamification for its fiction TV viewers.

The homegrown OTT platform is also betting big on direct-to-digital movies, with plans to launch 20 such movies soon. It is looking at releasing at least one such movie in Hindi every month, and at least one every week if other languages are also considered.

ZEE5 registers a growth of 15-20 per cent quarter on quarter, both in terms of revenue and subscriber base, he said.

Of its 1.14 crore daily active users, around 50 per cent hail from non-metros, said Katial. “We are seeing the next billion users coming in from KaiOS and entry-level android with PWA (Progressive Web App) and our new lighter app. It’s a very seamless platform. We have also invested a lot of technology behind it,” he said.

ZEE5 will continue to invest in content and technology, said Katial. It will continue mapping its users in terms of content, as content choices evolve “very quickly”, he added.

With hyper-personalisation as the objective, ZEE5 has partnered with around 14 tech start-ups from Israel since its inception. These partnerships have enabled it to segment its user base into 1,200 different categories of users, which helps it to gauge users’ tastes and consumption patterns, and accordingly recommend content to them. ZEE5 is able to garner an additional 25 per cent consumption through these recommendations, he said.

Noting that a lot of consumption is now moving back to television, ZEE5 is also attempting to move its users to consumption on TV, said Katial. “We build apps for every single TV ecosystem ― it comes embedded with it or you can download it from an app store So, we are on almost every TV device in the country, whether it’s the lowest-end Linux TV and open source TV to Android, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Apple, Xiaomi, or OnePlus,” he said.

Meanwhile, the OTT space in the country, though nascent, is cluttered with players like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar, Voot and SonyLiv, among others. “I think, everybody has found their space, which is a good thing. We are a mass player with lots of language affinity, (both) vernacular (and) Hindi. We believe that that really is the Zee brand. It touches India in every corner, at every level,” he said.

Katial added that ZEE5’s unique selling proposition is that it is a mass player of digital video in the country, with content being available in 12 different languages. ZEE5 brings out at least one original web series in six different languages each, every month on average.

Talking about ZEE5’s focus areas going forward, Katial said: “Between advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) and subscription video on demand (SVOD), there will be different focuses. In AVOD, we want to add more digital video ideas, and in SVOD, more premium use cases ― there is education, there will be direct-to-digital movies, ramping up of original content, short videos, aggregated news platforms, live news and live events. The (focus on) catch-up TV will continue.”

ZEE5 aims to attain 1.5 crore daily active users and 10 crore monthly active users in the next couple of quarters.

Once ZEE5 further consolidates its offering, Katial said that it is also looking at increasing its monthly subscription plan rate from ₹99 to ₹129, which may take place in the next six months.

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