Allu Aravind and Ajit Thakur decode aha’s success story

Launched in 2020, subscription video on-demand and over-the-top streaming service aha today boasts of 2,000+ hours of content, including 350+ hours of exclusive and original content and 32-million app downloads, and is known for its marquee shows such as ‘Unstoppable with NBK’ and ‘Telugu Indian Idol’. Furthermore, it has 12-million monthly active users. With its launch in Telugu and Tamil, the overseas network has now spread across US, UK and Australia as well as Southeast Asia, which includes Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Singapore. As per latest industry surveys, aha is already seen as the most preferred Telugu OTT service.

In conversation with Adgully, Allu Aravind, Promoter, aha, and Ajit Thakur, CEO, aha, speak about the success behind aha, the aggressive marketing strategy, the challenges they have faced in their journey, introducing gaming on the platform, the success with the Indian diaspora across global markets, and more.

Last year, aha started with gaming on their platform, what is the performance till the date?

Ajit Thakur: My biggest worry, what keeps me awake at night are tomorrow’s things. But 10 years from now, the primary consumers of OTT will be the 14-year olds today, and they are not watching drama or crime. They are into gaming. So, what we have said is that there are great gaming creators. We will become the platform for them. And over time, as we make more interactive content, we’ll offer the games also in the local language, the characters in the games must be able to speak. So, that is to target the younger audience.

We are doing hundred episodes, finite series. Currently we have gone to the gaming aggregators, there are a bunch of gaming studios that we are talking to, where they will extend our shows into the gaming.

What are the criteria for selecting the content or story?

Allu Aravind: It is very different from what we do in films. In films, they start, there is a middle and there is an end, and within that span of two hours, they tell everything. Whereas the advantage in web series is that you can tell the story of the secondary characters as well. That makes the story plot interesting. People have the patience to go through all that. Now we are making originals also for the platform. The change that has happened in the last 2-3 years is that there is more reception for web originals than web series. For one reason, when you start on web series today, you can see one episode or two episodes because people are all out of the pandemic and back to their regular work life. We have to cater to the new audiences, that is, the younger people and educated middle class. We have to give them better quality content, which all the platforms are struggling to make it. And we can proudly claim that we have the experience of making such content. We have a very strong team headed by me. We have been very successful.

What were the challenges that you faced in the journey from 1 million to 2.5 million subscribers?

Ajit Thakur: The biggest challenge was the content scale up. There are only so many writers and between films and TV to create a whole generation of writers. We had to experiment. We were the Guinea pigs in terms of trying to get the writers to write the kind of tonality that OTT requires. The second one was to retain the subscriber and have him/her coming back for more. So, that’s a continuous challenge. The churn was interesting and that is why we stayed with our weekly release strategy.

The third challenge was getting audiences in Tier 2 and 3 markets on board, which wasn’t easy because our strategy was not to go B2B. So, if they are downloading from other sites, it’s a single sign on for them. But we were not available like that. So, that education also has been a continuous journey for us. The fourth challenge is the competition. Every now and then the competition comes in and they buy the same film at 2x the cost, thus in two years the film’s costs have doubled. So, that is a continuous challenge for a local app.

We have pivoted to creating our own films so that we don’t have to buy the films at those astronomical costs. We have set up Aha Studio, where we want to create a lot more content in-house.

Now, we also have a fifth challenge of where everybody seems to be hiring our people or wanting to hire our people, which is good. That means we have done something right.

What is aha’s distribution strategy and how is trying to engage with the consumers?

Ajit Thakur: We want to own the customer. So, we will go B2C unless somebody has given us an opportunity to own the customer even if we are bundled. So, far we have done it with a couple of ISPs where it is still the aha subscriber. So then distribution becomes a function of marketing the brand very aggressively. And the beauty of the OTT world, unlike the television world, is that you are not dependent on a middleman. If your brand is strong, you can keep it strong by continuing with the marketing and reaching out to newer markets. And that’s where big star brands like Allu Arjun and Mr Balakrishnan have helped us reach those audiences much faster than what marketing dollars would get you.

In terms of overseas, it is absolutely fascinating. The Telugu diaspora is primarily in the US, Canada, and Australia, and in no time we scaled up to a hundred thousand. Today, we are at 110,000 subscribers in the US alone. For the Telugu diaspora there, a platform like aha works like magic because that’s a reconnection to their roots and language. Thus, we have had a great success story in those three markets. Now, we are targeting Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and we are also looking to target the UAE and cover the rest of the world.