Voot, which has so far remained on the fringes of the Indian streaming industry, is looking to premiere a Shahid Kapoor film directly on the service, and has already acquired rights to recent releases like Rocketry: The Nambi Effect, 777 Charlie, Vikram Vedha and Viacom18’s own production Shabaash Mithu.
Voot, which is estimated to have 4-5 million subscribers currently, is eyeing 20-25 million new subscribers on the back of IPL viewership, but it will need other content besides a product and technological revamp to drive such numbers, media and entertainment industry experts said.
“Voot, as a platform, will go through a massive transition in order to stream the IPL. Customer stickiness and high ARPU (average revenue per user), however, will not come from the tournament alone and the company will need to start innovating on films and web shows too, for which it is already making serious efforts," Karan Taurani, senior vice-president at Elara Capital Ltd said.
Voot benefits from the wide distribution strength of Reliance Jio, Taurani said, whereas other over-the-top (OTT) platforms have to share user revenue with the third-party telcos they’ve partnered with, making distribution and reach a challenge for them.
Even when Disney+ Hotstar streamed IPL, the company’s ARPUs in India remained below the $1 mark per month, as a huge chunk of subscription earnings went to telcos. “In that sense, Voot is in a much better position in terms of possible ARPUs and can prove to be a very good offering if the company builds on the product and tech experience," Taurani said.
Voot declined to comment on Mint’s queries on ramping up its general entertainment slate in the run-up to the IPL.
However, in an earlier interview, Ferzad Palia, head of Voot Select, Voot Kids and international business, Viacom18 had said the company will bank on a freemium, or a mix of advertising and subscription-driven strategies to drive growth in the Indian market, as it focuses on sports as well as its slate of international programming along with the goal to bring out one web show every month.
“As we go along, we see Hindi making up around 65% of our content slate and regional languages about 35%," Palia had said.
Aastha Beecham, business director of Rev Up, the branded content vertical of digital agency Puretech Digital, agreed Voot’s foray into regional markets, including Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, and Bengali is an attempt to cater to a wider audience.
Himanshu Arora, co-founder of digital agency Social Panga said Voot needs to build a library of exclusive content properties which can be bundled or cross-promoted as a prelude to the mega event of IPL. “Otherwise, it will be difficult to sustain the momentum gathered from the IPL. Since Voot doesn’t have rights to any other cricket content, they are already at a disadvantage; most cricketing properties are owned by either Disney+ Hotstar or SonyLIV," Arora pointed out.
A senior executive at a rival streaming platform said on the condition of anonymity that the presence of media veterans like Uday Shankar and James Murdoch has ensured Voot will go about leveraging the IPL the way Hotstar did.
This April, Reliance and Viacom18 entered into a partnership with Bodhi Tree Systems, an investment platform run by James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems and Uday Shankar, leading an investment of Rs. 13,500 crore in Viacom18, giving it nearly 40% of the company. James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is the former chief executive of 21st Century Fox Inc. and Shankar is the former president of the Walt Disney Co. APAC region.
“They know what they’re doing even though there is immense pressure to monetize the IPL, which is a prized possession of theirs," the person said.Meanwhile, the strategy to stream Viacom18’s in-house movie productions like Shabaash Mithu also follows other media houses like Zee and Sun Network that produce films and also own OTT platforms, Taurani said. “With less than 5 million subscribers, Voot was on the fringes till now and also one of the last to get into the SVoD (subscription video-on-demand) space. But now is the time to scale up," he said.
