Scaling new heights with content: Viacom18 CEO Sudhanshu Vats on VOOT future

Vats said that the aim is to double VOOT's monthly user base to 100 million.

By ET Bureau | Apr 24, 2019, 08.51 AM IST

Sudhanshu Vats, group CEO and MD, Viacom18, talks about future plans for video-on-demand platform VOOT.

In three years, how has your viewership grown?
We believe that it is important that every story finds its audience and every audience its story. This manifests best with VOOT, and the exceptional performance of all our Originals stand testimony to it.

OTT watch time has been doing phenomenally well in our journey of three years and has grown at 8x. With 60,000 hours of content, the consumption on VOOT has also grown significantly from 34 million+ active users to 50 million+ as of now. Our average time spent has also continued to grow and is now pegged at 100 billion minutes of watch time, making us the second largest Indian AVOD platform. Our aim now is to reach 100 million monthly active users within this fiscal.

How do you plan to compete with global content players?
With a commitment to offer quality and differentiated content in the digital ecosystem backed with technology and insights, VOOT now aims to reach 100 million monthly active users within the fiscal. As a part of our growth strategy, we are scaling our content library with a line-up of over 30 + VOOT Originals across genres and languages.

We will also have on board more than 20 new distribution partners across travel, broadband and mobile ecosystems as well as with OEMs.

There have been talks about you introducing a pay wall. Would you like to comment?

It was important to first build our current model to scale, which we have done effectively. We will soon diversify into four different offerings — the current AVOD model, VOOT Kids, VOOT International and VOOT Freemium.

While digital is slowly scaling up as part of a marketeer’s media mix, what is VOOT doing to ensure a part of the wallet?
To institutionalise the branded content play, VOOT will soon launch VOOT Studios, which will be a business performance-oriented content tech solution for advertisers looking to connect with digital audiences. It will allow brands to bring the world of story-telling, data and tech together to deliver the brand message and the ROI effectively for the business.

Tell us more about MAVARIC.
With the proliferation of digital content and its increasing consumption across mediums, understanding consumer behaviour plays a critical role.

VOOT’s consumer insights product MAVARIC helps advertisers identify the right audience and target their messaging by going beyond simple demographic profiles, with better consumer insights on online behaviour, purchase behaviour, affinity and interest among other things.

MAVARIC essentially manages audiences at VOOT through activation and data enrichment. It transforms big data into actionable consumer insights and further segregates them into more than 1,000 consumer segments that a brand and an advertiser can choose from. The service will also expand its suite of interactivity solutions with five new solutions in the coming months, to help brands roll out immersive brand engagements on its platform.

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Image: Reuters