Viacom18, the joint-venture company between American broadcasting giant Viacom and the Network18 group is launching a new online video streaming service and app which will be called ‘Voot’ by the end of this month.
Speaking exclusively to The Pioneer, Sudhanshu Vats, Group Chief Executive Officer and Gaurav Gandhi, Chief Operating Officer, Viacom18 Digital Ventures said that the reason to launch this new service was because they felt that patterns of media consumption are changing. “The mobile phone is the first truly personal device an Indian has had, since televisions and computers in most households are shared devices”, Vats said.
Viacom18 which runs channels like Colors, MTV, Nickolodeon and Comedy Central produces over 10,000 hours of content annually, Vats said and over the past a few years they have been uploading several of their top shows on Google-owned YouTube. “last we checked we had over 2.5 billion views for our content on YouTube”, Gandhi explained. He added that the huge advantage of online is that every viewer is seen as unique, “this makes it a compelling proposition for advertisers as they will know the exact demographic of the user unlike current ratings systems where 30,000 meters give ratings all-India.” He explained that the digital video advertising market in India is expected to grow five-fold from Rs1200 crore in 2015 to Rs6000 crore by 2020.
As a result of this move to Voot, Viacom18 will be removing much of their full-shows and other content from YouTube but will retain YouTube as a medium to promote their shows. To encourage users to migrate to Voot however, Gandhi explained that they will offer some compelling fresh online-exclusive content. “We will have a show called ‘Soadie’s for example starring Baba Seghal about a family obsessed with ‘Roadies’ and we also plan to have an exclusive movie at launch starring Gulshan Grover trying to make a comeback as a good guy.”
In addition Vats said that the online site and app which will also migrate to Smart Televisions by the end of the year will feature ‘Content within Content’ for some of Colors and MTV hit shows. “In Big Boss for example, we have 70 cameras recording content all the time, we could look at a feature called ‘follow the contestant’ exclusively on Voot or also look at stuff that gets edited out on ‘Khatron Ke Khiladi’ and so on”, he said.
However, the big play for the site will be on children’s content, where Nickolodeon will use their library of content from shows such as Chota Bheem and also content for really young tots and make it available on their app. “We will add parental control features to the app, which allows parents to prevent children from accessing content that they should not. We feel that the childrens market is underserved right now and these children who are growing up digitally connected is a great opportunity for the service.”