Viacom18’s digital video-on-demand streaming service and India’s second largest AVOD OTT platform – VOOT celebrates its third anniversary with 100+ billion minutes of watch time. With a commitment to offer quality and differentiated content in the digital ecosystem backed with technology and insights, VOOT now aims to reach 100 million monthly active users within the fiscal year.
As part of its future growth strategy, the platform also announced the further scaling of its current content library with a robust line-up of over 30+ VOOT Originals across genres and languages, to be launched this fiscal. Law and Honour, Naaz, Love All, The Raikar Case, Kaisi Yeh Yaariaan – Season 4, Marzi and Asura are few of the VOOT Originals that will be launched shortly.
“India will have an online consumer base of more than 500mn by 2022. Of this, more than 3/4th will be consuming video content. While technological advancements allow us to personalize content consumption, growth for the category will come from our ability to segment our offerings to multiple consumer segments accelerated by the three A’s – accessibility, availability and affordability”, said Sudhanshu Vats, Group CEO and MD, Viacom18, before adding, “VOOT has crossed the 100bn watch minutes’ mark in 3 years and we are now targeting 100mn monthly active users within this financial year. Additionally, we are segmenting the VOOT business into 4 uniquely focussed propositions – the existing AVOD model and the upcoming freemium offering, VOOT Kids and VOOT International.”
Institutionalizing the branded content play, VOOT announced the launch of VOOT Studios – a business performance-oriented content tech solution for advertisers looking to connect with digital audiences with branded shows, sponsorships, interactive formats in addition to other bespoke solutions.
Speaking about the branded content play for VOOT – Akash Banerji, Head – AVOD Business, VOOT said “Brands today realise regular ad spot while important is not sufficient to drive resonance with the consumer. Branded content solutioning is hence the way forward given that it allows for bespoke content curation and subtle communication embedded into the narrative of the show. VOOT Studios will allow brands to bring the world of story-telling, data and tech all together to deliver the brand message and the ROI effectively for the business.”
With the proliferation of digital content and its increasing consumption across mediums, understanding consumer behaviour now plays a critical role. VOOT’s consumer insights product MAVARIC is built to help advertisers identify the right audience thus ensuring high impact via communication. MAVARIC helps advertisers with consumer insights as well as target their messaging beyond simple demographic profiles and instead focuses on enhanced insights around online behaviour, purchase behaviour, affinity and interest and more.
Insights clubbed with interactivity solutions will allow brands to provide immersive brand engagements. Reinforcing the importance of interactivity on OTT platforms, VOOT will strengthen its current offering with the addition of 5 new programmes in the next few months which will fuel further growth and attract users to the platform.
Now available on iOS, Android, Web, and Amazon Fire TV, and built on a robust technology backbone, VOOT further strengthens its technology and distribution system by announcing over 20+ new distribution partners across the travel, broadband and mobile ecosystem as well as with OEMs. The OTT platform has partnered with smart tv manufacturer like CloudWalker, ShareIt , Act Fibrenet and travel network company OLA, amongst the others.
Currently driven by an Advertising supported video-on-demand model, VOOT will continue to build scale by soon diversifying from 1 business model of AVOD to 4 – VOOT AVOD, VOOT Kids, VOOT International and VOOT Freemium.