MUMBAI: Whenever a new streaming service enters the market, the primary challenge is distinguishing itself from others. In a market saturated with nearly 40 OTT platforms offering scripted fiction content, Discovery Plus is trying to position itself with an enticing bouquet of premium real-life entertainment content. After having proven its mettle in the market for over 25 years, Discovery is now looking at making its content available for consumers on convenient devices at a convenient time.
Talking about the ideation of Discover Plus, Discovery South Asia managing director Megha Tata said they figured out that there was a void in OTT offering in the genre, throwing up a great opportunity in the space. Tata also noted that one of the biggest challenges most of the OTT players are facing is the extremely high content cost, an unlikely challenge for them.
“We saw the opportunity was that we had a huge library of content, which is almost like 300,000 hours of content, which gets replenished every year, to nearly about 8000 hours a year, and all this content is owned by us. And a lot of that content has not been seen in India. So clearly, there is an opportunity for us to bring in more content into India, on our platform, which is talking to them in their own convenience, time and device. So that was the birth of Discovery Plus,” she stated.
And Discovery is not just bringing any content, but specially curated for the Indian audiences. She termed it as a product for India, by India which has been created with an understanding of the Indian audiences. “Languaging” will play a key role on Discovery Plus.
While differentiated content already is giving an edge to the new entrant over others, the product proposition has also been looked at uniquely. Discovery Digital (South Asia) business head Issac John talks about a vertical scrolling experience for people to first get a taste of the kind of content that is there on the app. He speaks about the ‘Shorts’ section which also offer three or four choices for each video to the user. It can be shared on Whatsapp, can be saved for future consumption, and the full-length episode can be watched. Moreover, there is a ‘MindBlown’ section to give users the best of the best content within the app by putting it as a collection.
John also mentioned that the app is dropping the episode of ''Into the Wild With Bear Grylls'' featuring Rajinikanth before TV. The platform is also coming up with a unique special on coronavirus. “So I think our way forward is essentially built on these pillars of how we can give consumers not just a great content, but also great product experience to access that content. So that's something that we are really going after in a big way,” he added.
“So what is local content to us is as long as it appeals to me in my language. And that is the beauty of this genre. Attacker running in the wild doesn't really matter whether he's running in English or Tamil. So for us original content for localization is languaging, which is something we have very successfully done on linear and we will continue to do on OTT as well,” Tata said.
Talking about marketing strategy, John said that Discovery content has already a very fanatic user base: the 25 million consumers (he calls them core consumers), who consume more than three hours of content on television. They are essentially activating them through the wide network. The second pool that the new platform is going after is essentially the consumers who have an interest in topics like adventure travel, food, lifestyle, etc. It has also launched a very scaled up performance marketing campaign. The overall marketing strategy will combine both TV and digital.
“The distribution strategy is primarily linked to, obviously, our main platforms like iOS, Android, and web. But going forward, we will also be present on connected devices. And the reason why we are going mobile-first is because we actually want to listen to user feedback across some of these platforms. And then, obviously, adapt the product a bit, get in some nuances of what we're hearing from consumers in the meantime, and then launch the connected DVP approach as well,” John commented on distribution strategy.
Although Tata did not reveal any definite time frame for breaking even, she said that as content cost is very negligible and hence the opportunity to be able to break even and become profitable will come hopefully soon.
