Voot Select was released barely a month before the entire world was placed on lockdown due to a pandemic outbreak. One million people paid to utilise the platform in its first year.
Voot Select has experimented with a range of material over the last two years, including 24-hour live streaming, exclusive access for paying users prior of the AVoD premiere, and a sports content portfolio.
Ferzad Palia, Viacom18’s head of SVoD and foreign business, talks to afaqs! about the lessons learned from these trials, as well as how the epidemic benefited the platform.
We announced in February 2021 that we were the first platform to surpass one million paid subscribers. We’ve seen a lot of progress since then.
We’ve been lucky in that our content and strategies have performed admirably.
We’ve expanded into new genres and stepped up our efforts in areas where we were already strong, such as reality television, original programming, and the international slate.
We’re also having a lot of success with our Kannada play. It, from a learning and growth viewpoint, it’s been a fantastic two years, and we managed to do so effectively, which is critical in our industry.
The last two years, particularly 2020 and a large portion of 2021, served as a stimulus for OTT sampling in general.
As a result, we’ve benefited from the audience pool expanding faster than we anticipated. The other element is whether you can draw folks to you once but they won’t return if you don’t have something they like.
The proof of the pudding is that they enjoyed something you had when they arrived. Retention is the golden grail of subscription businesses.
Retention and churn are two concepts that aren’t discussed nearly as often as customer acquisition. We’ve seen some extremely optimistic signals, both in terms of acquisition and retention, which can only happen if your offering is successful.
There are viewers who prefer free material and those who are willing to pay for a more advanced experience.
By experiences, we don’t just mean originals or movies; we also mean things like 24-hour access to content before it airs on TV or, in the case of Bigg Boss, all-day live streaming.
We also pioneered the idea of making the first episode of a new show available for free. On a case-by-case basis, we will continue to do so.
Then, after a long length of time (six months to a year), give it away for free for a limited time. It is critical for us to reach a large number of users who will sample the information we provide, therefore we employ a variety of tactics and continue to innovate on the concept.
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