MUMBAI: Viacom18, after establishing its main OTT service Voot, is now entering the digital space for kids with VOOT Kids. The subscription-based app targets the age group of two to eight year olds.
VOOT Kids, which is priced at Rs 99 per month and Rs 799 per year, houses content in seven different languages. While all of the content is available either in Hindi or English, a certain part of the content is also available in five other regional languages. VOOT Kids business head Saugato Bhowmik said that the content will soon be available in all the seven languages. The app has 20,000 pieces of content including over 6000 hours of video.
“Parents are always looking to curate multiple fun-learning opportunities for their kids because parents believe in holistic development of their children which means emotional development, mental faculties development, social skills development, physical development and entertainment. They are looking for all these developmental needs like curating multiple different fun-learning opportunities for their child. They invest in DYI, books, toys, crafts, puzzles today and they are spending a lot of money. So, for us the challenge was how do we go beyond entertainment where we are leaders and create a leading proposition which nobody has been able to do till now delivering both entertainment and fun-learn together,” he said.
Bhowmik is confident that people will subscribe because VOOT Kids seamlessly delivers and offers videos and tools, fun-learn tools, e-books, audio stories, fun-learn quizzes across five skill domains with parental control in a kid-friendly environment and design.
Considering their offering, the company feels that the pricing is justified. Parents are anyway spending a lot on each of these individually.
“We believe that fun-learning multiple different skills is very important at this stage. As you grow older, formal pedagogy becomes much more important. We did not want to get into that. We are not an ed-tech platform. So, that’s the clear choice we made. We wanted to impact early skill and learning development skill of the child. We also believe that this age group is not being served properly. There is lot of offering for 8-10-year-old kids. This early generation is under-served. We did not find anything that serves fun and learning together,” he explained the rationale of the target group.
The platform wants to leverage the entire power of Viacom18 for marketing the new kid in the house. Although it has its own media vehicle at home, it will still go beyond that by running cross-media, cross-TV, out-of-home campaigns along with on ground activities and influencer marketing. Bhowmik added that it will also be engaging in conversation with school, school teachers and the entire community in future to drive the message that screen-time is not bad if parents can make it meaningful.
Interestingly, the app just launched two days before Children’s Day. “We just want VOOT Kids to become the go-to destination for parents. If we are able to do that, there are millions of households who are willing to invest money in valuable fun-learning services like us,” he signed off.
