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Online streaming platform Hooq will now offer Hollywood movies on rent at ₹60 per movie as the Singapore-based firm looks to expand its presence in India.
Hooq, which is a partnership between Warner Bros, Sony Pictures and Singapore’s Singtel, is trying to take the ‘sachet’ approach to the streaming service to attract users who want to test the platform just to watch a particular Hollywood flick.
“We have decided to focus on being a premium Hollywood content destination. We feel there’s a big market for that in India. We have a big library of movies from Warner Bros, Sony Pictures and several of our content partners that’ll we’ll be offering,” Zulfiqar Khan, Managing Director, India, told BusinessLine .
Hooq, which tested local language content in India initially has now taken a subscription-only route to offer primarily Hollywood content that includes shows and movies from its content partners and will work as a content distribution platform in India.
Hooq is also working on dubbing its entire 10,000 hours of content library in Indian languages. “We plan to have our entire content library dubbed into Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.” said Khan.
“There are about 30 OTT players in India, each looking at original shows or local content. It’s a crowded market. We’ll focus on Hollywood content, at least for now,” said Khan.
Hooq has already partnered with Hotstar to offer its content on a larger platform, also helping Hotstar to expand its English content library. The company is now looking at building more such partnerships to expand in the market.
On Monday, Hooq announced the launch of Bhak , the winner of the inaugural Hooq Filmmakers Guild initiative and a first-of-a-kind Hooq Original series.
However, Khan insisted that the Indian original show is no indication of the company’s plans to work on Original shows in India. “ Bhak only happens to be the Indian series that won the Hooq Filmmakers Guild Initiative. We want to encourage quality content but the idea was not to create it for a specific market. ” said Khan.
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