The pioneers of Indian web entertainment content - The Viral Fever (TVF) - is not only planning to make 25-30 web series this year, but are also venturing into regional and non-fiction content.

“We will get into regional and non-fiction genres, on which we are already working for six months. Our focus is on eight Indian regional languages including Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Gujrati, Marathi and Punjabi,” TVF’s Chief Operating Officer Karan Chaudhary told BusinessLIne

TVF has major plans for audiences in South India, and have partnered with many content creators from the region.“There won’t be a lot of dubbing, but some of it, at the same time there may be remakes done. We are already working on one or two web series of TVF, to remake those in Tamil, “ Chaudhary said.

In the non-fiction category, TVF is doing a food show in partnership with Faasos. In the next 12 months TVF will be making 10 shows in this category. It is also working on gaming formats.

The progress so far

TVF has 18 million subscribers on YouTube, with 7Million+ TVFPlay app downloads. “We have seen 10x growth in the number of views between 2016 and 2018. In 2016, we had 200 million views and in 2018 there were 2.5 billion views, which is massive growth for us. Last year we did nine web series and this year we plan to do 25-30 web series,” Chaudhary said.

With new players entering the digital entertainment industry, TVF is looking at a collaborative approach. “We are partnering with many of these players and this helps us to scale up our project which we cannot do alone as a startup right now. The industry is very nascent now, for the next 3-5 years we need more players to create content in order to build the whole ecosystem, ” said the TVF COO. TVF has shows on Netflix, MX player and YouTube. But in the coming days there will be more focus on creating content for its own streaming platform - TVFPlay- with 2-3x more of its own shows TVFPlay than on any other platform.

A channel for everyone

While TVF primarily targets the youth, it has created multiple channels catering to different viewing habits. For example, TVF Originals is about long term formats while TVF Qtiyapa is meant for those who prefer short term formats.

Channels like ‘The Screen Patti’ is focused on tweenies (18-25 years). ‘Timeliners’ is a channel by TVF’s Delhi team which was set up to bring in some North flavour. ‘Girliyapa’ is a woman-centric content platform, aimed at pushing the boundaries for women. “Recently, we have done Royal challengers Bold League, a gully cricket format. To cater to the Indian Youth we still need 100 channels, because its a heterogenous group” said Chaudhary.

TVF believes that the subscription model in India is not a priority now since it wants to increase the consumer base. At present, video advertising is its core source of revenue.

(The writer is an intern at Business Line's Mumbai bureau)

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