ZEE5 plans to double its original content lineup; looks to increase paid subscribers

ZEE5 claims to have 101.9 million monthly active users (MAU) globally and about 9.6 million daily active users (DAUs) as of December 2021

ZEE5, the over-the-top (OTT) streaming from the stable of Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, plans to increase its investment in content as it aims to ramp up the content library in FY2023. The OTT platform which streams content in 12 languages, launched 51 original content last year and plans to double this in 2022. “This year we aim to focus on regional languages including Tamil, Telugu, Bangla and Punjabi besides Hindi in order to cater to a larger set of audiences. Between these five languages, we will offer high frequency, good quality content as well as big-banner movies. The objective is to expand our reach further in tier 2 and tier 3 markets and increase our paid subscription base in these markets,” Manish Kalra, chief business officer, ZEE5 India, told BrandWagon Online.

ZEE5 claims to have 101.9 million monthly active users (MAU) globally and about 9.6 million daily active users (DAUs) as of December 2021. On the subscription side, the platform claims to have seen high double-digit growth in terms of subscribers, Kalra however declined to share the exact numbers, when asked. As per the Q3FY22 earnings report, ZEE5 posted a 15 minutes quarter-on-quarter rise in average watch time to an average of 201 minutes of content per month.

The streaming platform claims to be not only strengthening its subscription-based content library but is also building a library of original content for its advertisement-based video-on-the-demand (AVOD). Recently, ZEE5 launched ZEE5 Spark initiative under which users will now be able to watch original content for free. “The idea is to expand our top funnel and get new content and new users on the platform with an objective to convert them to paid subscribers. We realised that there are a lot of good quality content that we can share with our users who are willing to watch them but are not willing to pay. Hence, if we provide them with good content on the AVOD side we have a chance to convert them into paid subscriber,” Kalra elaborated. For this, the platform has tied up with production houses such as Zoom and Rusk Media. It plans to launch two to three fresh content every week for consumers. This new initiative will operate on a revenue-share business model wherein a certain amount of revenue earned from the advertisements will be shared with the production houses, the exact details were not shared by Kalra. The company plans to scale this proposition in the next 10 months.

According to Kalra, the platform’s user base fall between 25-30 years old age group. While this is dominated by males from metros and tier 1 cities when it comes to content behind paywall, the user base is mostly skewed towards female viewers in the AVOD section simply because of consumption of catch-up TV content. As for advertisement revenue, ZEE5 claims to have seen 80-90% growth in advertisers in 2021 as opposed to last year. “Besides traditional advertisers, we have seen an incremental revenue coming in from new segments such as fintech and crypto,” Kalra added.

-          financialexpress