“It’s not about being the last or the first. It’s all about the time.” Just like it’s channel ‘Colors’ that entered the market (2007), at a time when its competitors were well established, Viacom 18 has finally entered the booming digital space as well with their mobile friendly ‘VOOT’ application (app) on 29 March. The VOD (video on demand) service is an advertising led platform, making it available for free on iOS, Android and web.
Housewives, kids and the youth are the three target audience VOOT has looked at and so it has Viacom18’s entire content library, including Colors, MTV and Nick! Banking majorly on ‘kids’, VOOT probably has the largest repository of kids’ characters in the Indian OTT space and has popular characters from across networks – from Nick characters like Dora, Spongebob, Motu Patlu to external popular characters like Chhota Bheem and Pokemon. What’s interesting is the the fact that this would be the first Indian OTT player which will be having original content that’s going to be rolled out in both, long and short formats across genres like comedy and drama. They have already announced the four original content web series and have few more in the pipeline.
“With kids’ content and our entire VOOT Originals line-up, the focus was to get people addicted to happiness. Through our content strategy, that is what we have held true. Our television channels also provide a very robust content bank that we will build upon, for the digital consumers. VOOT will be Viacom18’s singular gateway to quality and differentiated content, in the digital medium,” said Viacom18, group CEO, Sudhanshu Vats.
The VOOT app has many interesting things in place like VOOT shorts, just for you (recommendation) section, vooting now and also a dedicated kids page where all the shows will be available. Focusing more on the kids genre, VOOT has nursery rhymes section as well along with a collection page where the kids could do experiments, DIY activities and to top it all, they have provided with a parental lock option too. “The kids section is like an altogether different app within an app as there are about 7000 kids videos with more than 80 characters, not just from our network but also from others. We wanted it to be a one stop destination for kids as kids are obsessive about videos and want everything right now!,” added Viacom18 Digital Ventures, COO, Gaurav Gandhi. “So we have acquired the rights to showcase Pokemon, Chhota Bheem, Mighty Raju and many more cartoon series that air on various other channels.”
One point to be noted is the fact that there won’t be any original kids content for VOOT as of now but they are looking to come up with more IPs and animated shows in the coming future. Since MIP TV, the global TV and digital content market is happening from four to seven April, Gaurav said that they are looking at “acquiring more of kids content” over there, so we can expect a lot more kids shows coming on board at VOOT.
Apart from that, VOOT will offer four original shows – Badman, Soadies, Sinskari and Chinese Bhassad for the mature audience. But what’s missing here are the comic book based shows that have been gaining a lot of traction on Netflix and on the small screens. VOOT hasn’t tapped into India’s story rich comic industry which is gaining importance at least on the Bollywood front (Refer Graphic India, The Caravan, Doga). Commenting on it Viacom18 Digital Ventures, content head, Monika Shergill said, “DC and Marvel have a huge strong collection of comics and characters and as of now we haven’t thought of creating shows based on Indian comics. However we are looking for content and are open to the idea of coming up with comic based shows.”
Entering the market after its major competitors, VOOT had the opportunity to do a lot of R&D and work on their marketing strategy. In the coming days we will witness a lot of marketing and promotion of VOOT being done majorly on social media, YouTube and on their network channels.
Currently it’s too early to comment on how the app will perform in the market but seeing the current reviews from users on Play store, seems like they will have to work a lot more to improve the video streaming as the users are complaining of video breakdowns, slower streaming rate and demanding for videos to be put back on YouTube.
We will have to wait and watch to know how this VOD advertising based OTT service manages to win the hearts of India.