Mumbai: With its maiden advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) project "Lock Upp" delivering a stellar performance, Balaji Telefilms’ video streaming service ALTBalaji is currently experiencing its "KBC moment," as the platform's SVP of marketing and revenue Divya Dixit tells IndianTelevision.com. Clocking 100 million views within 19 days, and crossing 200 million unique views in 32, it has become one of the most-watched OTT reality shows since launching on ALTBalaji and MX Player.
"Lock Upp" marks a turning point in ALTBalaji’s journey, as the popular subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service opens up to the world of AVOD. The platform boasts 35 million subscribers, over 10 million MAUs, an engagement metric of 83 minutes per day, and a library of over 91 original shows. Up to 80 per cent of ALTBalaji's audience is under 35 years of age.
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Having achieved these milestones, AVOD was a natural progression aimed at expanding the audience base, including via cross-sell and up-sell for ALTBalaji. Furthermore, “it adds a layer of advertising revenue over a successful SVOD business,” says Dixit.
To this end, "Lock Upp" was designed to have an international appeal. Fronted by a controversial host Kangana Ranaut, and featuring equally controversial contestants, the show’s sets, costumes, tasks, and dares, were all planned to keep these objectives and audiences in mind. It will be exported globally from the next season.
“After achieving tremendous success locally, the objective of creating a format that caters to the international audience is to expand our audience base as well as establish a homegrown exported-to-world IP, and have the freedom to implement new ideas,” states Dixit, adding that, “The strategy worked as the responses that we received have all been quite positive and exceeded the expectations.”
The platform has registered equal male and female viewership in the 18-34 age group and a high Average Time Spent (ATS) for "Lock Upp." International traffic on the app has also shot since it started streaming.
Commenting on the idea behind launching AVOD with a captive reality show instead of other formats which ALTBalaji has seen success with, Dixit tells us that through AVOD the platform wants to ensure that its content also reaches the audiences that are currently still fence-sitters and buy-in OTT as a mainstream entertainment platform. “There had to be momentous propulsion and a valid reach thrust that would launch AVOD for us, and LockUpp with millions of views gave us that thrust,” she remarks.
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Going ahead, ALTBalaji will explore all different formats of entertainment through AVOD to have a prominent presence in the segment as well as to gain further reach. “Much like how we partnered with MX Player for ‘LockUpp,’ we are open to the ideas of other partnerships that will help us market our platform to the masses,” she asserts.
The ALTBalaji IP "Lock Upp" was created in partnership with MX Player. Owned by MX Media, MX Player is an ad-supported OTT service with over one billion downloads and 280 million monthly active users globally. The reality show is its first attempt at unscripted content.
“MX Player and ALTBalaji have always had a great business relationship, therefore we collaborated further on the show,” Dixit shares. “With the reach that MX Player enjoys, and with ALTBalaji emerging as a leader when it comes to unique content and marketing strategies, this is a win-win partnership for both platforms.”
As ALTBalaji gears up for a long-term AVOD play, it has established separate, dedicated teams and plans for both its AVOD and SVOD offerings to ensure that they do not end up competing with each other. “We have had synergies with several platforms and our history shows that we have managed all those ventures very well and very efficiently. Be it SVOD or AVOD, our main focus has always been to provide world-class entertainment for our fans,” concludes Dixit.
