Mumbai, India, August 21,2019- Uday Sodhi, Business Head - Digital, Sony Pictures Networks India, is upbeat about “reaching a big milestone” for the company’s digital streaming platform, SonyLiv.

“We are among the first to reach the 100 million download mark on Google PlayStore. That’s a big milestone for us. And after Hotstar, among the broadcast players, we are the only other brand that has reached that milestone. That is validation of our strategy, the direction we have taken, the kind of content and the experience that we are able to present in the app,” says Sodhi, talking about SonyLiv, which is all set to unveil a strong line-up of content in the next few months.

While The Ashes, the West Indies tour of India and the 11th season of Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC), besides a host of original and licensed shows make SonyLiv attractive to advertisers and viewers, Sodhi points out that the OTT industry itself is now large enough, and “mainstream” with about 300-350 million users, and hence a natural part of every media plan.

Sodhi talks about various facets of SonyLiv and the OTT industry at large. Excerpts:

On content, the biggest bet

We make sure that we address a large audience with content across genres and consumer preferences. At the top end, we have premium Hindi content, and the best of international content in English. And then sports – be it basketball, WWE, football or cricket. Almost 70 million people had watched the FIFA World Cup on our app. We were among FIFA’s top partners worldwide in terms of consumption in India.

We also have a huge movie library, and a large show library in Hindi because of our Television channels. We are now creating our own pipeline of originals across three languages - Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Then we have multiple partnerships to create content jointly, build content libraries, and host the entire library in multiple languages. Given that we have an audience of 70-80 million active users monthly, we have become a great platform for independent content developers to partner and make their content available to a large customer base. We are partnering with the likes of TVF and Arre for content development, independent of what we do on Television and in movies.

We are now making the popular Crime Patrol original for digital in Tamil and Telugu, with stories from those markets. Victoria, Good Doctor Season 2 are award-winning shows. Poldark is a fantastic show. Power is very big too, and we are coming out with Season 6, which will be released more or less on the same day and date as in the US. Into The Dark is a big show. Some other big shows are LA’s Finest, Britannia and Riviera. So we have big scale content, coming from the best content producers worldwide. It’s the power of story-telling that makes consumers love what they see.

Our new show Gullak, for example, is a beautiful story told in the right way. It didn’t need stars; it needed good actors, good artistes, and good story-telling in the right environment. It needed to be done authentically. There are stories when you need to put the stars out there, but the OTT environment clearly shows that you really don’t need stars for every show, and you can get away with good and authentic story-telling. We will surely look at period dramas, because there is traction for period dramas on SonyLiv.

We also will do some exciting stuff around KBC. Last year’s KBC was very exciting for us because we did ‘play along’ - sit at home and play the game with Amitabh Bachchan, which roped in a million-and-a-half people. Some of our experiments on sports, on play along, on real-time voting in Superdancer on TV, have been dramatic.

On launch of gaming platform

The gaming platform within the Sony Liv app has a lot to do with our shows. For example, simple content like Alladin and some of our kids’ shows, are very extendable to gaming. So is CID, our popular franchise. We are creating simple games around these. We are also looking at games around sports. The whole idea is to create additional interactivity and get more time spent on SonyLiv beyond video. Our target is a slightly younger age group. The TG will obviously overlap with the current SonyLiv TG, because we are using the same characters and the same content to reach out to the audience.

On cost of creating content and acquiring talent

Today, most of the content that we are creating is probably more expensive than Television content. Our investment on shows on a per hour basis is more than what we are putting into Television. So, the battle for content is obviously moving the needle on cost, but we realise that consumers need good content; we have to give them the best content available in the market. If that means investments to bring in the best talent and the best story-tellers, we will do that.

Source:https://www.exchange4media.com/digital-news/ott-and-video-advertising-are-part-of-every-media-plan-today-uday-sodhi-98963.html