Hendrik McDermott on OTT platform Hayu’s India growth plans

In December 2021, NBC Universal launched its subscription-based OTT (over-the-top) streaming platform, Hayu, in India. The platform specialises in the reality genre and offers over 8,000 episodes of reality TV content, including all seasons of ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’, along with franchises like ‘The Real Housewives’, ‘Top Chef’, ‘Million Dollar Listing’ and ‘Family Karma’, among others.

Hendrik McDermott has been associated with NBC Universal for over a decade and has been working on Hayu’s account right from its inception. He started as the SVP & Managing Director of Hayu in October 2015 and was promoted as Managing Director of NBC Universal’s direct-to-consumer streaming businesses in all countries outside the US in just 11 months.

In conversation with Adgully, Hendrik McDermott, Managing Director - Direct to Consumer, Global at NBC Universal, speaks at length about what led Hayu o launch in India, its association with Amazon Prime Channels, Hayu’s content and marketing strategies for India and much more.

What led to the decision behind expanding Hayu’s market in India? What response has Hayu received in India?

We launched the platform in 2016 and at its sixth year anniversary, we launched in the UK, Ireland and Australia back then and since then, we have been on a pretty aggressive and fast growth expansion trajectory. Every year that we have been in existence, we have expanded into one new region, or sometimes two new regions per year. And the plan is to try to grow the platform to be as large as it can be. We spent the last five years expanding into about 29 different markets. So beyond the UK, Ireland and Australia, we moved into the Nordic Region, we moved into the Benelux region into Canada, into Southeast Asia, in the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore.

In early 2021, we expanded across much of Western Europe. And then, towards the end of last year, we finally made it into our 29th market, which is India. And the reason for it is that we do a lot of research on various markets looking for expansion. And we are trying to find places where reality TV, specifically unscripted reality TV, is popular and where we think our content will resonate with the consumers. And so one of the things we did was a specific research project on the Indian market, and it shows that there’s quite a large addressable base of people who are interested in reality content and 33% of the addressable base that we saw, has a huge interest in reality TV. The majority of those people have an interest in US led reality TV as well. The research that we got back was very promising and we also use our own data points. We have a YouTube channel that we have launched, which is global and is available in all countries around the world. And we put a lot of short form content on that platform. And that allows us to see where we are getting a lot of interaction from the people. India is No. 1 on the list in terms of countries that are using our YouTube channel around the world. So, we knew there was a strong appetite for the content. And that has led us to think about launching here.

What are your observations in terms of content consumption behaviour in the Indian market? How different is it compared to the other markets?

The desire to watch content here is very strong. And so we see a very strong engagement with content. What that means is the sheer amount of content that is being viewed; we now have data from 29 different markets around the world and India is very near the top in terms of the amount of content that people will watch on our platform. We have been Live in India only for the last three months. So it’s early days, but we are seeing on average about 17 hours of content per user per month that is being consumed, which is a pretty high amount in terms of viewing. So, we are very delighted to see that there’s a strong engagement with the content.

You have tied up with Amazon Prime Channels in India. Why did you select particularly them for this partnership? What are the benefits that you have with this partnership?

A very important part of our strategy is to have partners all around the world. The way we usually enter a market is that we launch with our main direct-to-consumer platform first, and then we seek to create as many partnerships as possible. We have done that in every other market and this is no different. We launched in India in December 2021 and we launched with Amazon in February 2022. We are also actively having conversations with potential future partners. So, what we like to do is have numerous different types of partners – it can be across cable TV , telcos, and other SVOD platforms, we have numerous examples of partners that we have all over the world.

We selected Amazon specifically because we’ve had a long standing partnership with them in many other markets. We had launched on Amazon Prime Video Channels in the UK five years ago in 2017, and we have a partnership with them in many other markets already. So, it was reasonably easy for us to extend that partnership here to India as well.

We bring our own content to the platform. What has been helpful for us with Amazon here is that it is another place for us to go and find new subscribers. We are, of course, trying to sell subscriptions across as many devices as we can. Thus, it is hugely important for us to be present on as many platforms as possible. Amazon brings another group of people who are already there to watch videos. So, it is sort of a good place to look for further subscriptions.

While the content bank of Hayu in India has all time famous series like ‘Real Housewives’, ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’, ‘Top Chefs’ and others, do you plan to add more shows to the app?

We had almost 300 shows on the platform at launch, and today it is about 8,000 hours of content. We add 1,000 new hours of content to the platform every year, so we are constantly adding new franchises, specifically for India, we have acquired a variety of exclusive shows as well. In particular, the one that just launched last week is ‘Below Deck Down Under’, which comes from the Below Deck franchise, which is exclusive to the Hayu platform. The other main franchise on our platform is the ‘Real Housewives’ franchise, which has almost 13 different spin offs and some of those are exclusive to our platform as well. So, we will continue to add further content.

The way we normally enter a market is that most of our programming comes from within the NBC Universal portfolio. Our content comes from the key flagship brands of E, Bravo and Oxygen, which are based in the US. And so, we have access to all of the programming that comes from those channels. That’s why we can continue to keep refreshing our platform. And as we entered the market, and over time, we started looking at other ways to increase the content portfolio. And exclusive content is one of those things. As we move forward, we are likely to look at acquiring some third party content for the platform as well.

What is your marketing strategy for the Indian market? How are you promoting Hayu in India?

It is very similar to how we have entered almost all of our other markets. When we launch, we invest significantly in the market and we try to build up as much brand awareness as we can. Specifically in this market, we had a huge campaign in December 2021 and January 2022, which was focused on the Hayu brand itself. That was through more traditional media tactics – print, TV, radio, and also some podcasts, and outdoor advertising, etc.. The promotion strategy is really designed to try to build as much brand awareness as possible and in a short amount of time. That is the short term strategy, which is still continuing. We will be launching another campaign later this month. As we grow our brand awareness, we shift our tactics a little bit more to digital. We tend to drive as much of our subscription from social media platforms. But the first step is to build brand awareness of what our platform is before we can do that.