Nikhil Gandhi on what makes MX Player India’s quintessential Super App

MX Player has been relentlessly pushing ahead in the Bharat market. But it is not an easy market to crack. As Nikhil Gandhi, COO, MX Player, mentioned in his address at the recently concluded Goafest 2022, “The only person who has been able to crack Bharat is Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There’s so much to learn from him, he is the man who really understands Bharat.”

In conversation with Adgully at India’s biggest advertising summit, Nikhil Gandhi speaks at length about how he has been striving to take MX Player to the next level, the strong AVOD model that MX Player follows and why the concept of ‘free’ works so well in India, as he says, “Free is not an offer; free is an emotion.”

You have seen the evolution of this entire ecosystem. So, when you came here, what were the three things that you did to bring the platform to the next level?

I think before I came in, I was evaluating places and options I wanted to go into after the TikTok stint. And very clearly, MX Group stood out on many boxes that it was ticking for me. I could make out that the fundamentals of the company are extremely strong. When I say fundamentals, it’s not just the business fundamentals, but the product fundamentals as well.

What MX has been able to achieve in a span of two to three years is outstanding. They have got a fine product and a very high user-friendly interface, UI, and UX. They always looked upon being a technology-first organisation. So, the impetus on keeping the product upfront as the nucleus has always been the overall fundamentals on which we work as an organisation. And because of which, the investments have gone into content as well as on tech. So, there is a constant development of the product, and technology, constant involvement into how do we get the AI/ML deeper and make the experience better for consumers.

When I came in, I figured a lot has already been achieved, in terms of scale. My job here is predominantly to now grow into new areas where we should. We already have 200 million users, spread across the country. We are now growing state-wise and seeing where is the new growth areas going to come from. That’s one part of it. The second part of it is which are the demographics that we should target, whether it’s the males in a particular age group, or females in a particular age group; our core audience is 18-24 male. And in the 500-600 million smart phone users, we already have an active user base of 200 million. How do I get the rest of the base being active is my first priority.

Growth is a very sharp priority and it’s not just in India, but globally as well. In the last year, and ever since I joined, we have launched in at least 13 countries; our OTT services, our video player is available in 250 countries. We are already a super app, unlike any other OTT. We have got video, gaming and music streaming. So, it’s all under one roof. We are looking at what are the opportunities to increase the engagement for the user. Can we deploy more games? The third area that I am focusing on is new business development and with that what we have done is outside of advertising revenues, we also launched a subscription service – MX Gold.

MX Gold gives ad-free experience in HD and I firmly believe that the price points are quite conclusive. Organically, we have reached a certain level of scale and we want to take it to the next level. It’s already launched in many markets. Also, we are looking at launching an interesting pack called MX One, which is going to be an aggregator of different OTTs coming together, like a marketplace. And I think with that it will give us more leverage, because we have a higher base of audiences globally and we will be able to drive a lot more in terms of value for not just us, but for the partner as well.

The third and fourth areas are to increase distribution. How do we take the app into connected TV, into broadband service, into television devices, OEMs, smart TVs. That process is underway. We were already at a certain level of connected TV homes. We now want to go after the 15-20 million homes that are on connected TV.

The next, obviously, is revenues. How do we scale up in terms of growth? Last year, we saw 40% growth on our topline. This year, we are going for a 200% growth on our topline. We have identified the areas where we have not actually gone out in the market to monetize. Now all that is going to be available. We have already launched MX Advantage. We are also launching our own audience network – MX audience network. I think with these two we will be able to grow the ad-serving opportunity on MX as well as outside the MX network. So, lot of the other publishers are going to come to us; talks are underway for doing a pilot test and in the next three months we will be launching our entire audience network.

Will AVOD be a sustainable model?

India is a price-conscious country. We know what kind of prices consumers pay to watch content. Predominantly, they believe in free access and I think the biggest platform on digital video that has proved that AVOD is far superior than SVOD is YouTube. If you take a piece out of what they have been able to achieve globally, in terms of scale, topline, content, of tech, and innovation, I think we are on that same journey. Yes, we will have an SVOD service, but it will be largely to better your consumption experience. But predominantly we are going to AVOD.

We are free. Free is not an offer; free is an emotion. For India, free is an emotion. The Bharat believes in free and the moment you say something is free, it ignites an emotion inside you. So, I think that is exactly what our philosophy is. Yes, in the past few months, we have heard of some international folks having challenges with their subscription. I think it will be a matter of time for them to look at evaluating the AVOD services, especially for a market like India. And globally as well. There has to be a co-existence of people who cannot afford so much; so you make the content accessible.

We have actually democratised content consumption. Our app is free to download, free to consume. The moment you download, you can start consumption straight up. And because of the base, we have been able to drive a lot of success.

Could you throw some light on your content strategy?

In initial phases of the launch, there were some partnerships that we had done with certain partners. And, honestly, it was not to deploy that as a long-term strategy. It was more from a learning point of view, in terms of what is the content that India really likes to consume. And because of which, there were some perception barriers which got created. We don’t have any of those for the last one year. Our largest show is ‘Aashram’. ‘Lock Upp’ is a reality show that is giving us humongous amount of views. We have consciously moved at a strategic level in terms of content strategy. If you look at the variety of content today, we have more than 200 thousand hours of content available for you to consume, in 12 different languages. Every show that we produce is minimum served to you in four to six languages.

We have a huge base of audiences in the South: almost 27%. The content library is now huge. Show after show, we have been able to demonstrate that we are successful in terms of minutes consumed, and number of views. ‘Lock Upp’ has crossed 500 million with its finale.

We have deployed content strategy on the back of data; there is humongous amount of data which we also help advertisers to geo-target for their campaigns. Because we are a larger platform, we get more data and we are able to serve at better compared to other platforms. We also deploy data to repurpose our growth strategy and our content strategy. What are females consuming, what an 18-year-old or 24-year-old is consuming, how many times are they coming to the app, per-app visit, how many minutes they are watching, etc. The aggregation of 56 minutes per user per day is massive. For every such cohort of users, who spend X amount of time, we are always trying to optimise those cohorts.

What are the metrics that you use for the renewal of shows? Is it a blend of both data and gut feel?

You cannot run a business only on the basis of gut, unless it’s a brand new concept and you want to move into a direction of trying something new. Which is what we did with ‘Lock Upp’ and we were clear that the kind of definition of content that we want to see, in terms of format. For example, reality has a format which usually does not work on web series, on OTT. But this show has massive break-up. There is another show, ‘Campus Diaries’. We toy with genres basis data, consumption data, user behaviour data, plus we also visit consumers. The entire content team and creative team goes down to 30 cities in multiple towns, in different states, talks to consumers, and non-users in person, understands their life, their aspirations, etc., so that they don’t miss out on a new trend emerging. We create a content strategy based on that data, genre definitions, and growth areas identified.

What is your content strategy for the non-Hindi regional language market?

From day one, we had decided that we cannot be a Hindi-only app. We have always had all multi-language content available. Every show that is produced is also dubbed in multiple languages. However, we also do it the other way round, where we do shows in the regional languages, dubbed in Hindi and served to Hindi audiences. We have got a lot of regional language-first shows outside of Hindi, from the South, in Tamil, Telugu, etc. We just did a show called ‘Dhahanam’ by Ram Gopal Verma, shot in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu.

In Marathi, we did ‘Samantar’. There is another show called ‘Ek Thi Begum’, shot both in Hindi and Marathi. Another superhit show that we did with Ramya was ‘Queen’, the story of Jayalalitha, shot in Tamil, and served in Hindi. The Hindi version was a bigger hit than the Tamil version. We have now deployed a conscious strategy in growing our regional-language content. We have identified Bengali, Odiya, Punjabi, and Bhojpuri. These are languages that we feel are driving the consumption for us.