The past few months have seen Indian video streaming OTT platforms initiate aggressive expansion strategies to capture markets with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for regional Indian content: both at home and abroad. While the domestic market has opened up on the back of rapidly expanding internet penetration in the hinterlands, demand for regional content from the widespread Indian diaspora has resulted in Indian OTT companies like ZEE5, ALTBalaji and ErosNow embark on a steady simultaneous overseas march.
In the case of the domestic market, new user profiles indicate that companies have no choice but to focus attention on smaller towns and rural markets because in the long-term, a sustainable business model would need to be anchored by small town viewers and, eventually, subscribers. Girish Menon, partner, and head of media and entertainment, KPMG India points out that out of every ten new users entering the Indian market, nine are likely to be non-English speaking and five non-Hindi speaking. India has also traditionally been region-focused when it comes to entertainment consumption, with almost 45 per cent of TV viewership accruing to regional language channels. “But, the digital medium has generally struggled to cater to this demand. So, the natural strategy is to invest in regional content to mine that market further,” Menon says.
An increased focus on regional content is not limited to Indian players, with Netflix, Amazon and the rest also having invested substantial sums on developing good local content libraries.
Tapping the diaspora
Developing muscle in diverse language content, however, has opened up a substantial market outside Indian borders: the diaspora. ZEE5, for instance, is already available in 190 countries and is set to unveil an “extremely aggressive agenda” for its global business this month. “across content, distribution and localisation”, according to CEO Amit Goenka.
Eros Now is present in over 100 countries, while those like ALT Balaji have tied up with other international platforms like YuppTV to reach potential Indian viewers overseas.
While the ready demand for regional content, which companies have already invested in, is one factor driving this expansion, the other is the potential for large-scale monetisation in these markets, where a subscription-based model is actually viable against the largely advertisement-based business in India.
“Outside the Middle East, the propensity to pay is much higher in markets like the US, UK, Canada because they are used to paying for content. The only challenge is getting these viewers to choose to subscribe to another OTT platform, when they already have several. It is more of a competition and distribution challenge, because most Indian platforms are pretty reasonably priced out there,” observes Menon.