Executive Dossier

Understanding ALTBalaji’s ‘under 35 viewers’ with Divya Dixit

Published

4 years ago

August 13, 2021

As ALTBalaji senior vice-president – marketing and revenue, Divya Dixit has played a pivotal role in driving the company’s vision in the fast-growing and dynamic OTT sector. She carries over two decades of experience in business, marketing and brand building across the digital, OTT, broadcast, telecom, music, and retail industries. Before joining ALTBalaji in 2018, she was with ZEE5 where she conceptualised and developed the brand ‘ZEE5 ‘and ‘ZEE5 Originals’, as well as launched the platform and multiple original shows.

At ALTBalaji, Dixit looks after marketing budgets and recovery via direct subscription revenue. She is also responsible for the overall growth of the platform, program scheduling, and analytics as well. Under her leadership, ALTBalaji has been one of the top three grossing OTT apps, having doubled its direct revenue YOY in the years 2018-19 and 2019-2020.

On Tuesday, Balaji Telefilms announced its financial results for AMJ 2021, as per which ALTBalaji sold a total of 1.8m subs, up 35 per cent QoQ. Its direct subscription revenues stood at Rs 17cr. Boasting a current active subscriber base of 2.4m (excluding subscribers on partner apps), AltBalaji continues to drive growth for the Company.

Interestingly the platform is also turning younger everyday with 80 per cent of the current viewers being less than 35 years of age. The brand has registered a 100 per cent YoY growth with respect to the same, especially in the hinterland markets. According to Counterpoint Research’s Survey, AltBalaji’s 25-35 audience accounted for 59 per cent of its users in 2019. The development is significant because ultimately it is this age group which drives the OTT market.

Indiantelevision.com’s Ashee Sharma got into a freewheeling conversation with ALTBalaji, senior VP – marketing and revenue, Divya Dixit to understand this under-35 viewer base and more.

Edited Excerpts

On ALTBalaji’s young viewer base and the value it holds for the brand

Youth programming continues to be our focus at ALTBalaji. We are striving constantly to keep the stories as young, inclusive, and as vibrant as possible in the hope of making a difference to the future of society. Some of our top viewed shows in this category have been Broken But Beautiful Season 3, Puncch Beat, Dev DD, Crashh, Dark7white, and LSD.

We are here to make disruptive content that breaks stereotypes and is relatable to New India, and this development is significant for us because it implies that our brand has been able to crack the code for the youth and those young at heart. It has made ALTBalaji the benchmark for other OTT platforms. We expect a steady surge in viewership, especially among the 18-35 year olds who are leading the binge-watching trend today.

On the difference between this audience and the rest in terms of consumer behaviour

Most of OTT consumption happens with viewers under the age of 35 years who are far more tech-savvy, however also most often the busiest. Shorter attention spans seem to be a universal thing with this demographic unless their interest is piqued. So it becomes necessary for us to create content that catches the viewers’ attention right from the get-go. Nowadays, content is all over the internet, and with the intense competition, cracking the code to a viewer’s interest is most important. We believe we have been successful in this regard. Our engagement metrics have gone up from 48 minutes a day in FY18-19 to 83 minutes currently and the audience comprises 21.29 per cent women, with men dominating at 78.71 per cent.

On the content and marketing strategy for the <35 yrs TG

At ALTBalaji, digital marketing is an important element of the marketing mix. Associating with like-minded brands, engagement across short format apps, using actors’ social media reach, and activities with youth influencers for content promotion, have been our primary approaches. We have a robust analytics platform with a live dashboard that provides us information on views and engagement, as well as the demographic details of our subscribers. This helps us in understanding behavioural consumption patterns, and drives our content and marketing strategies.

The youth has most definitely made a shift towards OTT platforms over traditional means of entertainment. However, the debate over their preference for movies or shows is still on. ALTBalaji has noticed the people under 35 lean in favour of shows that break stereotypes and have unique narratives, and so we continue to launch shows across genres such as thriller, crime, romance, and drama, all the while maintaining our focus on out-of-the-box story ideas.

Moreover, our content is tailor-made to attract larger audiences. Currently, in India, the most widely spoken language among approximately 70 per cent of the population is Hindi which has been the priority for ALTBalaji. 95 per cent of our content is Hindi originals, although various other shows have been dubbed to ensure that the content is not limited to the Hindi-speaking populace. . Our recent shows like Broken But Beautiful, Mai Hero Boll Raha Hu, His Storyy, and The Married Woman have given us a massive surge in viewership.

On the thought process behind targeting this age-group

This age group is the one that sparks maximum creativity among writers and content creators, and that’s because they have a voracious appetite for unique narratives. Also, it made sense to cater to an audience that is well-versed with technology, willing to experiment and pay upfront for content. The phenomenon of Binge-watching actually started them, and so, it was only reasonable for us to work with the low hanging fruit first. We saw a huge increase in subscriptions, with growth percentages doubling in multiple cities including Lucknow, Rohtak, Ludhiana, Srinagar, Guwahati, Shimla, and Ranchi, to name a few.

On the impact on advertising revenue, and if attracted similar brands to the platform – brands that catered to younger audiences.

In 2020 alone, ALTBalaji has partnered with almost 25-30 brands for various shows. Our marketing strategy includes brand collaborations as it helps us to reach out to a larger audience. The partnerships have also kept our existing users incredibly engaged with all the collaborated offers they receive.

Young brands including Imagicaa, Pipo Popcorn, My Imagine Store, Growfitter, Ferns N Petals, and Ixigo have recently partnered with us for our youth drama Puncch Beat 2. These associations include value-added services to our existing customers. For instance, Ferns and Petals, our official gifting partners for Puncch Beat 2, provided a 20 per cent discount coupon to our viewers on their next billing. Ixigo is associated with us as the travel partner allowing 20 per cent off exclusively for ALTBalaji subscribers. The offering is based on the insight that the youth love discovering the world. Growfitter, the fitness partner for our recent shows, provided free one-month Growfitter Premium Subscription to the ‘fitness-conscious’ contest winners. In addition, brands like Imagicaa, Pipo Popcorn, and My Imagine store have been roped in as entertainment, snack, and gadget partners, respectively, thus encouraging the new audience to get on board.

On the evolution of the business and subscription models of ALTBalaji

Brands are increasingly starting to be aware of the growing popularity of OTT. Associating with the right brands would be a win-win for both partners by gaining visibility among the right target audience through in-show integrations and surround marketing. In 2020 alone, revenue from mobile internet advertising in India was Rs 7331 Cr and is predicted to rise to Rs 22,350 Cr in the next five years, increasing at a 25.4 per cent CAGR as per PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2021-2025. Utilising this fast-paced growth to the maximum potential will prove highly lucrative to businesses. However, the revenue model is still evolving. Constant innovation and timing are both the key and the challenge in this sphere. Getting it right could prove extremely fruitful for both players in the partnership.

Talking of subscription models, there is a consumer out there for every content choice. AVOD/SVOD/TVOD are business models and the only choice the consumer has to make is if he/she wants an ad free experience or is comfortable with ads interrupting the viewing experience. As far as TVOD goes, it’s yet to see some traction in India as OTT platforms are still priced very economically. However, in developed countries where SVOD is largely the order of the day, TVOD as sampling for a particular piece of content works very well.

I believe in the long term SVOD is a more sustainable model, and the good news is that more and more audiences are willing to pay for content which has moved the SVOD needle up from 5 per cent, three years ago to almost 25 per cent currently. Our subscription model is priced at INR 300 annually while our quarterly plan costs 100, and half-yearly is set at 180. This is not just for youth but for democratisation of content in the country.

Related Topics:ALTBalaji Balaji Content Digital Divya Dixit OTT programming streaming SVOD TVOD

Up Next

Disney reports 174 million paid subscribers at the end of third quarter 2021

Don't Miss

SonyLIV’s Marathi original series ‘Shantit Kranti’ to premiere on 13 August

Click to comment

Executive Dossier

Game on, fame on as Good Game hunts India’s first global gaming star

Published

2 weeks ago

January 27, 2026

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Game faces on, pressure high India’s gaming ambitions are levelling up. Good Game, billed as the world’s first as-live global gaming reality show, has officially launched in India with a bold mission: to crown the country’s first Global Gaming Superstar.

Blending esports with mainstream entertainment, the show brings together competitive gaming, creativity and on-camera performance in a format that tests more than just joystick skills. Contestants will be judged on gameplay, screen presence and their ability to perform under pressure, reflecting how gaming has evolved from pastime to profession and pop culture currency.

Fronting the show are three high-profile ambassadors: actor and entrepreneur Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Indian cricket star Rishabh Pant, and gaming creator Ujjwal Chaurasia. The winner will take home Rs 1 crore ($100,000) among the largest prize pools for any Indian reality show along with the chance to represent India on a global stage.

Backed by a planned annual investment of up to Rs 100 crore, Good Game is also courting brand partners, promising a minimum reach of 500 million among India’s core youth audience. The creators position the show as a bridge between entertainment and interactive culture, offering long-format content, community engagement and commercial scale.

Auditions are now open to Indian citizens aged 18 and above, inviting amateur and professional gamers, creators and performers alike. Shortlisted candidates will be called for in-person auditions in Mumbai on 14 and 15 February, and in Delhi on 28 February and 1 March 2026.

With big money, big names and even bigger ambition, Good Game signals a shift in how India views gaming not just as play, but as performance, profession and prime-time spectacle.

Digital

SpotDraft hires new CMO and CFO to fuel global push for its AI contract platform

Published

2 months ago

December 3, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

INDIA: SpotDraft has strengthened its senior ranks as it gears up for faster global expansion, naming Alon Waks as chief marketing officer and Amit Sharma as chief financial officer. The appointments follow the firm’s $54 million Series B round earlier this year and mark a push to scale across the Americas, EMEA and India.

The AI-powered contract-lifecycle-management platform has posted 100 per cent year-on-year growth in customer acquisition, counting Apollo.io, IPSY, Mixpanel, Oyster and Panasonic among its global clients. The firm processes more than one million contracts annually, with volumes up 173 per cent and nearly 50,000 monthly active users.

Waks, a veteran of Kustomer, Bizzabo, CreatorIQ, LivePerson and ZoomInfo, will steer global marketing and category positioning as legal teams adopt AI-driven tools. Sharma, who has led finance across scaling tech firms since 2016, will guide financial strategy, investor relations and market expansion.

Both hires aim to sharpen SpotDraft’s bid for a larger slice of the fast-growing legal-tech market, expected to exceed $63 billion by 2032. Co-founder and chief executive Shashank Bijapur said the company is focused on scaling go-to-market operations in the Americas, deepening leadership in EMEA, and accelerating AI capabilities for general counsels and legal-operations leaders.

Clients report shorter deal cycles and better alignment between legal and business teams. “What used to take weeks now happens in days,” said Abnormal Security senior legal operations manager Susan Koenig. DeepL head of legal operations André Barrow, said SpotDraft has helped reframe legal “from a cost centre to a generator of revenue”.

Executive Dossier

Outdoor Ads Get Smarter as LOC8 Shifts OOH from Visibility to Attention

Published

2 months ago

November 28, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Out-of-home ads were once the wallflowers of marketing seen by everyone, noticed by few. But in an age where attention has become the world’s most fought-over currency, even billboards are getting a brain upgrade. Enter LOC8, OSMO’s AI-powered attention engine, quietly reshaping the old OOH playbook by measuring not just who could have looked at an ad, but who actually did. The shift is subtle but seismic: impressions are out, impact is in and data, not gut instinct, is calling the shots.

In a landscape where marketers question every rupee spent outdoors, LOC8 is turning lampposts, flyovers and traffic islands into precision-mapped attention laboratories. By crunching dwell time, visibility zones, perceptual size and real-world obstructions, the platform is dragging OOH into a future where creativity meets computer vision and where the best ideas aren’t just eye-catching, but eye-measured. From automotive facelifts to FMCG novelty and real estate trust-building, the message is clear, outdoor has stopped shouting and started listening. Indian Television Dot Com explores more about it in an Interview interview with OSMO co-founder Nipun Arora.

On how OSMO is shifting outdoor advertising from a visibility-led medium to an attention-led one through LOC8.

Traditional OOH has long been measured by visibility and impressions i.e how many people could see an ad. OSMO, through its proprietary AI platform LOC8, is shifting that narrative more towards likelihood of being noticed. Using computer vision and machine learning, LOC8 analyzes real-world video data to measure visibility zones, obstructions, dwell time and perceptual size; bringing precision to how attention is quantified outdoors. It moves the focus from mere impressions to quality of impressions, making OOH a data-verified, attention-led medium comparable to digital in accountability.

On how marketers can use LOC8’s dwell-time, visibility and perception insights to craft more effective, emotionally resonant OOH campaigns.

LOC8 helps brands understand how people truly experience outdoor media how long they look, from what distance, and under what conditions. By quantifying dwell time, visibility duration, and perceptual size; marketers can plan campaigns that align with real human viewing behavior. This empowers creative and strategy teams to design emotionally resonant storytelling where messaging, visual hierarchy and placement are optimized for how people actually notice and process OOH creatives.

About what LOC8 has revealed through campaigns like Renault Triber and Namaste India on how categories such as auto, FMCG and real estate use attention metrics to drive outcomes.

Each category uses attention data differently but all share one common goal: to convert outdoor visibility into measurable engagement.

• Automotive | Renault Triber

For the new Renault Triber facelift, bold creative met data-led planning through LOC8. By analyzing on-ground video data, LOC8 measured real audience attention across placements factoring in visibility zones, obstructions, traffic speed and perceptual size. This enabled Renault to identify corridors that delivered maximum reach, saliency and engagement, optimizing media efficiency and ROI.

• FMCG | Namaste India

In OOH, innovation is the hook and assets are the bait. But bait often hides the hook. With Loc8’s attention metrics, we ensured the bait wasn’t a hurdle, rather it became the perfect stage for innovation to deliver its full impact! The insight proved that creative novelty, when validated by attention data, drives deeper engagement and measurable brand lift.

• Real Estate

For luxury and real estate campaigns targeting HNI/UHNI audiences, attention patterns differ especially between front and rear passengers, who are often the core audience segment for premium sites. LOC8’s ability to distinguish rear vs. front visibility plays a critical role here. It helps identify sites that offer longer viewing windows and stronger perceptual dominance from the rear seat where decision-makers are most likely seated making it a key differentiator for premium and trust-led categories. Together, these insights prove that auto optimizes for impact, FMCG for recall, and real estate for trust visibility showing how attention metrics adapt to category goals while ensuring measurable outcomes.

On how attention analytics will shape the future of brand storytelling and media planning as OOH becomes more digitised and data-driven.

As outdoor digitizes, attention analytics will inform not just where to advertise but how stories are told in public spaces. This evolution transforms OOH from a static broadcast channel into a dynamic attention ecosystem, where creativity is optimized through evidence-based insight.

On how LOC8’s data-led framework helps marketers quantify OOH impact and make outdoor a more accountable, ROI-driven medium.

LOC8 bridges the gap between intuition and evidence. By quantifying metrics like visibility duration, attention opportunity index, and visual saliency rank, it allows brands to benchmark site performance and justify investment. This data-led approach brings transparency, comparability and ROI measurement to a medium historically driven by perception.

On how OSMO ensures AI and computer vision enhance creativity rather than reduce it to numbers.

OSMO believes that technology should enhance creativity, not overshadow it. LOC8’s attention models reveal what naturally draws the human eye helping creative teams refine design cues, contrast, and visual hierarchy for greater impact. By merging art and science, LOC8 empowers creativity with intelligence.

About the creative best practices and design cues LOC8 has uncovered regarding what truly captures consumer attention outdoors.

LOC8’s visual cognition analysis has surfaced clear patterns across campaigns:

• High contrast and minimal messaging outperform cluttered designs.

• Motion cues draw significantly longer dwell times.

• The first two seconds are critical, creatives must establish focus instantly.

• Contextual alignment between the creative and its environment increases attention by over 30%.

These learnings offer a scientific foundation for creative effectiveness helping brands design OOH that’s visually magnetic and emotionally memorable.

On how attention metrics will integrate into omnichannel planning where OOH, digital and social work together for unified brand impact.

Attention can become the unifying KPI across OOH, digital and social to creates seamless storytelling continuity, where outdoor triggers digital engagement. The future of omnichannel planning lies in attention-led integration ensuring that campaigns don’t just reach audiences everywhere but truly capture and hold their focus.