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Tag: Sunil Rayan

  • Moloco & Viacom18 forge multi-year partnership for ad serving on JioCinema

    Moloco & Viacom18 forge multi-year partnership for ad serving on JioCinema

    Mumbai: Moloco, a leader in operational machine learning (ML) and advertising technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Viacom18 and JioCinema in India. As part of this multi-year partnership, Moloco is using its advanced machine learning and ad serving capabilities to build a powerful monetization solution for Viacom18/JioCinema, and it began with the Tata IPL last year. The Tata Indian Premier League, featuring 74 matches, providing the ultimate opportunity for streaming media monetization, with advertisers reaching massive global audiences of engaged sports fans. Last year, 449 million cricket viewers watched Tata IPL on JioCinema from March to May 2023. Supported by the Moloco ad-serving technology, JioCinema served targeted ads to a peak concurrent viewership of 32M users.

    Moloco streaming monetisation is an enterprise software solution that empowers streaming services to transform how they monetize content and media in order to unlock profitable growth. Moloco works with streaming platforms to maximize the value of each ad impression from price-driven decisioning to outcome optimization. The rise of streaming video globally coupled with the complexity of serving ads at live events makes this partnership an exciting opportunity to innovate, by delivering engaging ads and profitable advertiser ROI.

    “As the streaming media industry continues to focus on monetization, we’re excited to partner with leading players such as JioCinema to develop their performance advertising engine,” said Moloco’s chief business officer Sunil Rayan. “We have leveraged Moloco’s deep experience in advertising technology over the last decade to build an ad serving solution for JioCinema that ensures stability at scale and improves user experience during peak times. Looking ahead to Tata IPL 2024, we anticipate an even bigger opportunity to engage millions of viewers while also creating measurable value for advertisers,” he added.

    JioCinema CPTO Akash Saxena stated, “By using Moloco’s advanced algorithms and highly optimised ad serving infrastructure, we were able to deliver ads to 32M viewers concurrently during Tata IPL 2023 and offer new monetization opportunities to our advertisers.”

    Speaking on the announcement, Moloco’s general manager for India Siddharth Jhawar said, “India’s 700 million digital population has shown a growing preference for consuming video content online. As streaming platforms scale and look for more monetization opportunities, Moloco Streaming Monetization can help them grow profitably.”

  • Disney+ Hotstar’s Sunil Rayan joins Moloco as chief business officer

    Disney+ Hotstar’s Sunil Rayan joins Moloco as chief business officer

    Mumbai: Machine learning platform for mobile apps Moloco announced recently that it has hired Sunil Rayan as the company’s first chief business officer.

    In his new role, Rayan’s duties will include overseeing all commercial functions across Moloco’s products and platforms, ensuring the proper strategies are implemented. He will report directly to CEO Ikkjin Ahn.

    As a pioneer of mobile ad performance marketing, Rayan brings over 25 years of global experience building commercial and product operations & leading go-to-market teams. He also brings a unique skill set and expertise in business strategy and scaling up large technology-driven businesses.

    “Together, we will help customers grow significantly by helping them unlock the full value of unique, first-party data with Moloco’s world-leading machine learning and infrastructure solutions,” said the statement.

    Prior to Moloco, he served as president and head of Disney+ Hotstar, where he grew the streaming business 8x to over 50+ million subscribers, scaled more than 20 markets internationally for Disney+ and Disney+ Hotstar across India, Southeast Asia, Middle East, and Africa, and led the launch of the next-generation Hotstar streaming platform. Before joining Disney+, Rayan held leadership roles at Google for more than seven years, where he led the Global Mobile App ads business and helped build Google Cloud solutions for games. Prior to that, he was an Associate Partner at McKinsey, serving technology clients across a variety of functions.

    “I am happy to welcome Sunil Rayan as our Chief Business Officer. He brings the expertise in enterprise cloud products, engineering, business development, and proven success building & scaling global sales organizations that will help Moloco accelerate its next stage of growth,” said Moloco CEO Ikkjin Ahn. “He is a humble and ambitious leader with a track record for successfully growing global businesses, and we are excited to have him join us on our journey.”

    “Moloco is a generational company that is bringing the power of machine learning to programmatic performance advertising and enabling monetization for direct-to-consumer businesses of all sizes,” said Sunil Rayan. “Together, we will help customers grow significantly by helping them unlock the full value of unique, first-party data with Moloco’s world-leading machine learning and infrastructure solutions.”

  • Disney+ Hotstar’s Sunil Rayan moves on

    Disney+ Hotstar’s Sunil Rayan moves on

    Mumbai: Disney+ Hotstar India president and head Sunil Rayan has decided to move on from the company due to personal reasons, sources have confirmed to IndianaTelevision.com on Thursday. He will be associated with the company until the end of May. 

    Rayan oversaw Disney+ Hotstar’s overall business in India. He was responsible for driving scale, innovation and breadth of content.

    He joined Disney+ Hotstar India from Google where he worked for eight years, and last served as the GM and managing director, cloud for games. 

    Rayan has global experience – having scaled businesses in the US, setting up large teams in South East Asia, and working with super app players in Latin America. He has also worked with Infosys, iGATE Mastech, and IBM.

    He completed his bachelor of engineering in computer science from Madras University in 1996, after which he moved to the US in 1997. 

  • Prime Video’s Gaurav Gandhi, Disney+ Hotstar’s Sunil Rayan on growing SVOD in India

    Prime Video’s Gaurav Gandhi, Disney+ Hotstar’s Sunil Rayan on growing SVOD in India

    Mumbai: After the windfall of 2020, the streaming industry saw consumers’ on-demand content consumption patterns getting more and more well-entrenched and diversified in 2021. As exaggerated trends rationalised, players in the OTT world emerged out of the unarguably positive conundrum with a lot more clarity on charting their individual growth stories and also that of the industry as a whole.

    At the Apos Indian Summit – a two-day virtual event which concluded on 24 November – Disney+ Hotstar president Sunil Rayan and Amazon Prime Video country head Gaurav Gandhi talked about having learned the “balancing act” through the session titled – ‘The Next Stage of Growth for Online Video’.

    Drivers for Adoption

    In addition to widely discussed factors such as affordability of internet services, smartphones, and smart TVs and the availability of content, Rayan and Gandhi had their own unique insights on the growth drivers for streaming services. 

    According to Rayan the surge in volume and diversity of content through the years has brought about the mainstreaming of online video in different stages. “While the early stages were mostly about penetrating the market, the second wave of creating localised content that we are currently riding has propelled the trend further. Going into the third stage of deep localisation where user experience will become highly personalised, we will witness another leap in adoption,” he averred. 

    Like Rayan, Gandhi too believes that the encouraging pace at which Indians took to on-demand services was also a result of a new wave of content coming in. “The content distribution structure in India has always been such that it didn’t allow scope for any kind of premium cable or premium pay. As a result, we never really had access to high cinematic quality content. In the last three or four years streaming platforms have brought world-class content including original long-format series that Indian viewers had not seen before. And this includes both global content and local, home-grown stories,” he said.

    Commenting further, he added that a significant factor in the five-year-growth story of video streaming in India has been its “rich and robust content ecosystem with content industries in over ten languages. That makes it a prolific entertainment market.”

    The emergence of films as a popular segment on streaming platforms, accentuated by the direct-to-digital wave of 2020, further quickened the pace of adoption. “India has a large audience base that loves movies, but the country is very under-screened. Video streaming not only solved the problem of limited access to new movies in the very early window but also enhanced their reach and accessibility. Indian films are today being watched in over 4500 cities and towns and 180-190 countries worldwide on various streaming services. It has also encouraged talent, fetching its appeal across borders,” stated Gandhi.

    Both Rayan and Gandhi recognised the role of advancements in digital payment infrastructure in transforming a largely ad-supported industry into subscription-driven. Rayan shared that a “significant portion of payments for Disney+ Hotstar comes through UPI.”

    Developments such as these and others like rapid growth in smart TV sales, give Gandhi a good reason to dispel the prevailing notion of India being a highly price-sensitive market where viewers are unwilling to pay for content. He estimates the addressable market for SVOD in India to be above 50 million currently, with a potential to reach nearly 100 million in the coming years.

    The response to Disney+ Hotstar’s revised pricing plan designed to have devices tailored against tiers is another testimony to the acceptance of SVOD by value-seeking customers. Elaborating on the rationale behind the new scheme, he stated, “While we were providing access to all types of content, the mode of access is where we thought we could add more value. The broad idea was to make available all types of content to individuals as opposed to having content restrictions by tiers.”

    Growing the SVOD Category

    Rayan observed that going ahead “the overall success of SVOD will depend on three factors – making content more interactive, innovation in business models beyond the existing freemium, AVOD, TVOD, SVOD to something like ‘mircotransactions,’ and taking the user experience to a level where people can get their ‘intent’ from the platform itself.”

    Disney+ Hotstar started its Originals journey in 2019 and it has since then diversified into various genres and formats. “We intend to deliver a piece of original content every two weeks for all our different kinds of users including sports fans, active streaming users, and ‘TV watchers’  who use OTT as a ‘companion app’ to TV. Additionally, we are also exploring ways to get internet users on to our platform with short-form content, short but episodic and other formats that are native to digital,” said Rayan. 

    India is one of the highest engaged countries for Prime Video service in the world. Having grown three times in the last two years, today it enjoys viewership from 99 per cent of the pin codes. Another highly encouraging development witnessed by the brand is the emergence of ‘cross viewership’ wherein viewers are watching content across languages. “Today 50 per cent of the viewership for Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada DTS films on our platform comes from outside the home state. Similarly, international language content such as ‘Parasite’ last year or ‘Maradona: The Blessed Dream’, this year is being viewed widely,” shared Gandhi.

    He credits the quality of Indian content on streaming services that are at par with international standards for the 20 per cent viewership (one in every five views) on Prime Video originals coming from outside India. According to Gandhi, another significant trend in the past couple of years, especially through 2020-21, has been the acceptance of OTTs as a ‘living room phenomenon’ and a product for the household as well as the individual, simultaneously.

    Buoyed by these developments, Prime Video has doubled down on investments in the content to keep the momentum on SVOD going in 2022. As regards sports content, while it has made a start in the direction, Gandhi asserted, “We feel very good about the fact that our overall entertainment portfolio has many strong pieces in it, and we are not dependent on anyone. We would like to evaluate the opportunities that exist in sports, but we are not compelled to.”

    For Disney+ Hotstar 2022 will be about “working on user engagement, experience, and stickiness while delivering quality content at scale,” informed Rayan.

  • Disney+ Hotstar launches exclusive commentary feed for VIVO IPL

    Disney+ Hotstar launches exclusive commentary feed for VIVO IPL

    Mumbai: Disney+ Hotstar has launched an exclusive commentary feed titled ‘Hotstar Dosts’ to enhance the entertainment quotient of VIVO IPL 2021, which resumed on Sunday.

    Featuring a commentator line-up of comedians and entertainers such as Zakir Khan, Varun Sharma, Abhishek Upmanyu, Anubhav Singh Bassi, Amit Bhadana, Amit Tandon, Harsh Gujral, Angad Singh Ranyal, and Vrajesh Hirjee who are popular among the young, digitally savvy cricket fans, the feed will present LIVE cricket action in a fun, engaging, and relatable manner.

    Speaking on the launch of ‘Hotstar Dosts’, Disney+ Hotstar India, president and head, Sunil Rayan said, “Disney+ Hotstar is the go-to digital platform for all sporting action and our constant endeavour is to offer newer engagement opportunities to tap into a wider set of users. As we continue with this edition of VIVO IPL 2021, we present to our subscribers a whole new dimension of ‘cricketainment’ with ‘Hotstar Dosts’, making VIVO IPL enticing for everyone.”

    Viewers can access the ‘Hotstar Dosts’ commentary feed from the audio settings tab on the Disney+ Hotstar interface. The feed will be available in the Hinglish language. It is currently planned for all evening matches.

  • Disney+ Hotstar unveils 2021 slate, Ajay Devgan’s digital debut series on the list

    Disney+ Hotstar unveils 2021 slate, Ajay Devgan’s digital debut series on the list

    New Delhi: Streaming platform Disney+ Hotstar on Tuesday unveiled its latest content line-up for 2021 with engaging original series and movies across genres and featuring several noted actors. 

    The new line-up includes high-magnitude productions like the period-action drama magnum opus series The Empire helmed by Nikkhil Advani and starring Kunal Kapoor, Dino Morea and Shabana Azmi, and crime-drama series Rudra – The Edge of Darkness which marks the digital debut of megastar Ajay Devgn, and Esha Deol.

    Some of the new movies that are set to be available on the OTT platform include: Ajay Devgan starrer war-epic Bhuj: The Pride of India, chaotic comedy Hungama 2 starring Shilpa Shetty Kundra, Crime thriller Collar Bomb starring Jimmy Shergill and horror comedy Bhoot Police starring Saif Ali Khan.

    The platform is also expanding its subscription offering. Starting 1 September, it will add three new subscription plans, namely – Mobile plan for Rs 499 per year (single device, mobile-only plan), Super for Rs 899 per year (access to two devices across mobile, web and living room devices) and Premium for Rs 1499 per year (access to four devices across mobile, web and living room devices).

    Disney+ Hotstar, president and head, Sunil Rayan said the 2021 content slate demonstrates the company’s relentless pursuit of bringing original and locally relevant stories to its consumers. “With our fresh slate of movies and shows, we are proud that India’s top stars and industry stalwarts have chosen to debut with us to present stories that are genre-defining clubbed with high-quality production that makes Har Watch, Top Notch.”

    The platform has also scaled up stories featuring strong characters and women-centric narratives including the second season of Aarya featuring Sushmita Sen, Fear – a supernatural thriller starring Tisca Chopra, and medical drama Human starring Shefali Shah and Kirti Kulhari. The line-up also includes the ‘Special Ops Universe’ where multiple characters, stories and seasons will co-exist within a universe in a multi-series format; starting with Kay Kay Menon-starrer Special Ops 1.5.

    Star India, president and head, Hindi and English entertainment, Gaurav Banerjee said, “At Disney Star, we believe in the power of great storytelling. We have always challenged conventions and been at the forefront of content creation with powerful and category-defining stories ranging from strong women-centric narratives, mythology to history and contemporary tales. We’re thrilled to expand our offering on Disney+ Hotstar by adding an incredible array of blockbuster movies and multilingual original series in Telugu and Tamil.”

    The line-up also includes murder mystery Six Suspects starring Pratik Gandhi and Richa Chadha, the tech-thriller Escaype Live, political dramas City of Dreams (Season 2) and Gharshana, bestselling novel adaptation Those Pricey Thakur Girls, dance reality series Dance+, the third chapter of popular franchise Criminal Justice starring Pankaj Tripathi.

    In addition to these shows and movies, the subscribers will also have access to Disney library titles, Disney+ shows and movies as well as sports content through LIVE streams of the biggest cricket tournaments, including the VIVO IPL 2021 and the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup – all within the next six months (as per current schedule). The platform will also showcase LIVE streams of upcoming Tennis, Football and F1 tournaments.

    Actor Ajay Devgn, who makes his digital debut with crime-drama series Rudra – The Edge of Darkness said, “The quality of entertainment being delivered via digital platforms has opened up avenues for filmmakers to experiment and scale-up. The sheer scale of production of these projects has multiplied significantly in the last few years. My upcoming series Rudra – The Edge of Darkness is bigger than anything I’ve done before.”

    CONTENT LINE-UP:

    New Shows:

    1.      Historical fiction The Empire starring Kunal Kapoor, Dino Morea, Shabana Azmi and Drashti Dhami,

    2.      Crime drama Rudra: The Edge of Darkness starring Ajay Devgn and Esha Deol, Family crime drama Aarya (Season 2) starring Sushmita Sen

    3.      Medical drama Human starring Shefali Shah and Kirti Kulhari

    4.      Murder mystery Six Suspects starring Pratik Gandhi, Richa Chadha, Ashutosh Rana

    5.      Political drama City of Dreams (Season 2) starring Priya Bapat, Atul Kulkarni, Eijaz Khan, Sachin Pilgaonkar

    6.      Tech-thriller Escaype Live starring Siddharth, Javed Jaffrey, Ritvik Sahore

    7.      Supernatural thriller Fear 1.0 starring Tisca Chopra, Saurabh Shukla and Rajesh Tailang

    8.      Crime drama Gharshana starring Naveen Chandra, Sarath Kumar and Jagapathi Babu

    9.      Family drama My Perfect Husband starring Sathyaraj

    10. Mystery thriller Family Matters starring Murali Sharma, Nandu, Akshara Gowda and Sonia Agarwal

    11. Romantic comedy Those Pricey Thakur Girls starring Akshay Oberoi, Saher Bamba, Raj Babbar and Poonam Dhillon

    12. Live animation series The Legend of Hanuman (Season 2) with voice by Sharad Kelkar

    13. Dance reality series Dance+ with Remo D’souza

    14. Crime-drama series, Criminal Justice (Season 3) starring Pankaj Tripathi

    15. Espionage thriller Special Ops 1.5 starring Kay Kay Menon

  • Disney+ Hotstar announces over 250 job openings

    KOLKATA: Disney+ Hotstar has announced over 250 job openings across different levels and verticals to drive its next phase of rapid growth and transformation. The streaming platform plans to recruit multifaceted talent right from engineers to marketers and consumer growth personnel across client platforms, personalisation of video content, payments, and subscriptions, it said on Thursday.

    The platform provides diversified entertainment offerings to its fast-expanding subscriber base including thousands of hours of movies and television, across international and local titles.

    “Our commitment to expanding our workforce reflects our confidence in India’s immense growth potential as we seek to create engaging content for the next billion digital viewers,” said Disney+ Hotstar president & head Sunil Rayan. “In these disruptive times, we are keen to create opportunities for talent to thrive in an environment built on the core values of diversity and inclusion.”

    Disney+ Hotstar was among the strongest contributors to net subscriber additions, making up approximately one-third of the total Disney+ subscriber base. The company continues to rapidly expand its streaming service in the APAC region. Post the India launch, Disney+ Hotstar was made available in Indonesia, followed by Malaysia to have access to its massive content offering on the platform.

    “Disney+ Hotstar provides an opportunity to work with the best minds in the business, offering multiple specializations under one team. It not only enables engineers to deliver top-quality entertainment to millions of customers but also hone their skills in video, machine learning, personalization, payments, subscription, identity, security and fraud and an array of client platforms,” it said in a release.

     

    The app has notched over 400 million downloads, and also secured top spots on the Google Play Store as well as the Apple App Store.

  • Industry heads see huge headroom for growth across TV & digital in India

    Industry heads see huge headroom for growth across TV & digital in India

    KOLKATA: At the Asia Video Industry Association’s (AVIA) recent Future of Video India conference, industry leaders remained upbeat about the potential for growth in India’s television landscape despite a painful 2020 which had seen a 25 per cent drop in TV advertising revenue.

    The conference opened with an overview of the Future of Video in India with Media Partners Asia (MPA) India VP Mihir Shah. With learnings from the last year and economic resurgence in certain sectors, MPA predicts that in the next five years, with every new incremental dollar in the region, India will have 35 per cent share, almost evenly divided between television and online video.

    While cable in general is going through a structural decline, pay-TV subscriptions will grow both in value and volume and continue to offer scale for the traditional media players. And with more than 60 online video services in India, the total addressable market will continue to expand.

    This local expansion is what Disney+ Hotstar president & head Sunil Rayan is eyeing, with the streamer’s next stage of growth primed at developing their product for India, with pricing and content made for the local market. As India is a mobile-first market which drives individual viewing, while OTT and TV is not a zero sum game, OTT content needs to be far more engaging for individual viewing. “Fundamentally, we don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach for India because there are multiple Indias within India,” mentioned Rayan.

    The sentiment of diversity and positive co-existence among the platforms was echoed by Discovery Communications India south Asia MD Megha Tata. “India lives in several centuries at the same time,” she said, and this is not only the beauty and complexity of the market but also the opportunity to do more. While it is still a long way away before the demise of the TV, a differentiated content and product offering remains a key focus.

    “Content is king . . . distribution is god . . . that play of god and king will continue but differentiation of content will play a critical part in decision making,” added Tata.

    This focus on local content is also what drives content platforms. Netflix India VP content Monika Shergill shared that premium storytelling was a new space in India, as Indian audiences were open to experimentation and yet gravitating towards highly local tastes. “Our job and our passion is to find the best stories . . . the biggest stories . . . the untold stories from India and to become the service of choice for Indians in India . . . and in different parts of the world,” shared Shergill.

    For Zee5 Hindi Originals head Nimisha Pandey, the initial focus was on building volume, though it has now shifted to adding to the variety and scaling up the content offering. She, too, has realised the need to up the game on the regional market for the next set of growth. “There is so much demand that there is much hope for everyone to grow their businesses,” said Pandey.

    As the market where the next billion consumers of video will come from, Zee5 Global chief business officer Archana Anand summed it up best when she said, “It is the decade of video.”

  • Disney+ Hotstar ropes in Google’s Sunil Rayan as president & head

    Disney+ Hotstar ropes in Google’s Sunil Rayan as president & head

    KOLKATA: The rebranded Disney+ Hotstar service gets a new head in India. As per reports, the streaming service has appointed Sunil Rayan as the new president and head. Rayan comes from Google where he was managing director for Google Cloud for Games. Former Hotstar CEO Ajit Mohan left the company in 2018.

    At Google, Rayan helped oversee product, engineering and business development strategies to help build Google Cloud for Games as managing director of the segment managing the mobile app promotion business team in 13 locations across the world. He left Google in April 2020. He also worked as associate principal at American management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

    Rayan will be working closely with Walt Disney Company Asia Pacific president and Star and Disney India chairman Uday Shankar. As the new head, he will be leading a service which has seen major changes in content strategy, subscription model as as rebranding in last one and half year. Walt Disney's Disney+ was integrated into Hotstar in April 2020.

    “Five years ago, we set out to disrupt the way India consumed content and that mission has turned out to be totally revolutionary. Sunil is an exciting talent with global accomplishments and I am very excited to have him lead the talented Disney+ Hotstar team. At Disney+ Hotstar India, we are on a mission to create the country's largest and most advanced platform for curated content, and Sunil is just the right person to drive that ambition,” Shankar commented.

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