MUMBAI: What do Raj Nayak and Divya Dixit have in common? Both the media veterans are convinced that India’s burgeoning over-the-top (OTT) ecosystem is set for consolidation in the near future. The former Viacom18 chief operating officer predicted that the number of OTT platforms operating in India will be down to single digits by 2022 during the 2019 FICCI FRAMES. Dixit, who works with Balaji Telefilms’ streaming service ALT as its senior vice president and head marketing echoed a similar sentiment recently during the HT Brand Leadership Summit.
Despite OTT being the flavor of the season at the moment, Dixit believes only two kinds of streaming services are likely to stay the course – platforms with a mix of powerful content and irreverent marketing and those with deep pockets. To further drive home her point, Dixit drew a parallel with the consolidation in India’s broadcasting sector.
“Is there going to be a consolidation? Yes, it has to. There’s no way 32 players will survive. Are all of them going to be national? May not be true because you also have a Sun TV down south, you also have Bengali regional and growing. Are they all going to consolidate at some platform? Yes, I think so and there have been examples and other industries if you look at it like broadcast. There was a point of time where there were 15 GEC channels, today there are 5 surviving. So consolidation is the name of the game,” she argued.
Language is a great play to work with because real India, Dixit feels, resides outside Mumbai and Delhi. Out of the 1 million new internet users India adds every month, nine out of ten are looking for content in their native language.
“Now how is it that the homegrown players can leverage this opportunity and look at that user converting onboard? That is the game we after,” she said during a chat for the HT Brand Studio.
Dixit was among the early votaries of using language as a means of differentiation. While at ZEEL, she had rolled out the “apni bhasha mein feel hai” anthem for ZEE5.
“For Amazon Prime Video, I’m sure the market is little larger thanks to the fact that they have an e-commerce service bundling offering and therefore Prime Video gets funded as per that. However, for Netflix, it’s a much more an elitist story, with the kind of content, with the kind of imagery they have,” said Dixit about the two international players vying for a slice of the Indian OTT pie.
The focus at ALT seems to be rather clear. The streamer intends to reach out to the masses and speak in their language.
“Hindi is the main space area that we work with. We have also dabbled in regional content which we’ll continue doing in the future and we are priced very sharply. So you could safely say that we are going after the Indian masses and I think global and home-grown players all have a fair turf to play on,” the veteran executive added.
While ALT will continue experimenting with content in Bengali, Tamil, Bhojpuri shows among others, its primary objective is conquering the Hindi language market.
“Are we going to take that step right now? Maybe not. Are we first going to conquer the Hindi market? Yes, for sure,” Dixit stated.
While Hindi still commands 70 per cent of the language market, the brain behind ALT’s marketing strategy has no doubts about language being the driver of the content consumption in India.
