Originals, films, sports to be SonyLIV’s key focus in 2017: Uday Sodhi

SonyLIV, the OTT platform from the Sony stable, recently refreshed its brand identity and unveiled its renewed brand ethos “We LIV to Entertain” (#WeLIVtoentertain). 

With its new positioning, the brand underlines its commitment to fulfilling the most basic and pressing of human needs – that for robust, high-quality entertainment. In order to create top-of-the-mind recall, SonyLIV also launched a brand film with a clown – the eternal entertainer – at the heart of the film, driving home the message that ‘Kamaal dikhaana, Kamaal ka kaam hai’ (It’s no mean feat to keep everyone entertained). 

To complement its brand ethos, the OTT platform has also rolled out a new logo which encompasses a full spectrum of colours with a young, energetic and self-effacing approach. The logo itself represents the brand’s reinvigorated emphasis on filling the lives of viewers with vivid entertainment that covers the key aspects of variety, depth, novelty, relevance and popularity. 

In conversation with Adgully, Uday Sodhi, EVP and Head, Digital Business, Sony Pictures Network, speaks about the changes in SonyLIV post the revamp, growing competition in OTT sector, plans for 2017 and more. Excerpts: 

What changes can we expect from SonyLIV post the brand revamp?
We are now looking at SonyLIV to take our growth in the digital space to the next level. As part of our journey – we have been in this market for almost four years – we now look at this as a huge opportunity to influence the digital video space and make SonyLIV the destination for digital video. As part of that process, over the last 4-6 months we have added significant amount of content, new genres, a lot of sports, short films, original content and a huge film library. With this, we thought that it was time to take this market with a new brand logo and identity. 

How is the growing competition in the OTT space shaping this industry?
The sign of competition – both and international – has been great because that is the first sign that this industry is now genuinely of a big size. For the last 3-4 years, we and a couple of other players have been trying to invest and put in money to grow the market, grow the ecosystem and content. If more and more people come into this ecosystem and more investment is made on the content side, on the technology side, on the proliferation of entire habit to make more people consume content on digital media – we believe this to be amazing for the ecosystem. 

If you look at the entire ecosystem, we are under 15 per cent penetration of connected devices in this country out of a billion phones, 150 million-odd are connected to the internet. This itself is a large enough opportunity. And this opportunity is growing around 30-40 per cent every year. There is no other industry today that is growing at this pace – this whole sector is content hungry, entertainment hungry and it is easy for people to consume content. We have never seen such sort of huge evolution in India. Today if we have to go for any entertainment, the only way is to walk into a theatre, pay Rs 300 or so and watch a movie at 3, 6 or 9 pm. If you had to watch television, there are particular slots of 6, 7, 8, 9 pm, etc. The OTT space gives you the freedom to do what you want and watch content when you want it. Look at what happened in the case of news. Earlier, people used to read only newspapers. When television came in, people said that it would spell the end of print media. But both print and television have continued to grow, and then digital happened. So you have 24 hours notifications coming as breaking news. There is room for everybody in this space with lots of innovations. I think we are beautifully placed, which is why this whole rebranding is to say how we want to take this whole opportunity to the next level. 

What kind of disruption do you see with the launch of Amazon Prime Video?
I think this is excellent for the ecosystem. Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Hotstar, YouTube, us and a lot of other players will put in significant investment to grow this ecosystem. We will create new genres, new shows, new content types which will be specific to India in different languages, different lengths, different sizes. I think it will just open up this industry to be a huge ecosystem. So we are sitting on our hockey stick curve and this is the best time for people to come in. SonyLIV is beautifully placed; being around for four years, we understand the ecosystem, we are already in front of a million phones, we have got so much popularity, with content coming in on a daily basis. Therefore, we think we are well placed. 

How would you describe SonyLIV’s performance in 2016?
We’ve had a spectacular 2016. We did two very large sporting events. We did Euro’16, which was a huge success, we had almost 20 million users who came in and experienced Euro for the first time on their devices. It was probably one of the largest international football events that people watched on their phones. It was also one of the most searched items on Google that they released recently. We also did the whole La Liga Football tournament, which is a huge success. The match, which took place a couple of weeks back, had humungous viewership. Thus, we have been very excited about sports. We have also added a huge short film category, and also a huge category of originals. Originals is something that we are going to invest in more and more. In fact, we have a Hindi original going out next week. We have one Marathi language original programming that we are getting into and Gujarati as well. We want to get deeper into languages with original programming and see how well we can do in some of these markets. So, 2016 has been a year where we have seen humungous growth and customer adoption, we have introduced new content categories and genres which have worked very well for us. 

What would be your focus areas in 2017?
We will focus on three key things – Shows, these will be not just shows on television, but originals as well. Second focus will be on films, where we will be doing a lot of short films, over and above the regular Bollywood and Hollywood content that we do. Third focus will be on sports, where we intend to be by far the single largest destination for sports. Following clearance from the government, we will have the biggest portfolio in sports with the power of ESPN, Ten Sports and Sony Six.