MUMBAI: Travelxp wants to travel far and wide. The Mumbai-based lifestyle channel, that has already seen a steady revenue growth for the last few years, now intends to grow by 30-40 per cent in the coming year.
The network intends to expand to at least 15 more countries by the end of 2019 fiscal, and Latin America is one of them. The channel is already available in English, German, Czech, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian, and Travelxp director Nisha Chothani says it will soon be launched in Chinese too by December 2018. The channel caters to the Indian local markets through its Hindi, Tamil and Bengali feeds. The plan also includes launching certain South Indian and Marathi languages as well.
“Since our plan is to enter Latin America and Russia, we will be launching one of these two languages depending on which country we are in Latin America. Spanish or Portuguese language might be the one and then Russian as well,” said Chothani.
All shows on the channel are original in-house productions and its content is divided into six main categories – destination, lifestyle, food, culture, nature and heritage. Audience analysis has found that shows about hotels or anything related to spa works well.
When it comes to the growth of OTT platforms, Chothani feels it is just another medium of consuming content. “So today when we say that TV viewership is dipping, at the same time we see that all these OTT platforms have become a part of the apps on television, and that’s more like having one more channel on TV. So ultimately you are watching it on TV, whether it’s coming through satellite or internet,” she said.
She added that when it comes to OTT platforms, Netflix and Amazon are also the channels that provide differentiated content and have more content than other players in the market. As far as the preferences of the viewers are concerned, they might consume daily soaps, movies, news or infotainment on digital as well, which is the same that you see on the linear television. “TV is just the medium to transport our content,” she added.
While producing a show, in order to keep the viewers glued to their channel, it obviously takes a lot of effort for not by the broadcaster but the crew making the show. Chothani said that when they produce any show, five people are required to take up the responsibility as the amount of equipment that is carried by them is difficult for an individual person to handle.
When it comes to the time and efforts made in making just a show, Chothani said that if it’s just the shooting for the program, it takes minimum 20 days to shoot at the destination. Pre-production and post-production take around four months and later the post edit part also consumes four weeks to set the ball rolling. “By the time we start identifying the destination, designing, what all you need to see in a destination, getting the permissions for the shoot to be done, getting 4K ready, where it takes the longest time, from ingesting a material to rendering an episode and dubbing the same in various regional languages, it is a long process,” she explained.
Travelxp has had its content work in most countries. “Mauritius now wants to include in different packages, earlier, we were only in one package but now they want us in more than one package because they find people liking this particular genre in travel,” she added.
The channel is all set to launch its new programme named 10 Days Cyprus. The story revolves around a normal traveller who visits a place in 10 days, shooting all the exciting things about that place, in a bid to make the viewer plan a holiday by watching the show.
