Premium strategy is one of Voot Select’s advantages: Ferzad Palia

Voot Select is all set to premiere their new web series, titled ‘Bandon Mein Tha Dum’, which is based on a nail-biting journey of the 2020/21 India’s tour of Australia. The four-part series with approximately 200 minutes of content is slated to release on June 16, 2022 on the SVOD platform of Voot. In conversation with Adgully, Ferzad Palia, Head - SVOD and International Business, Viacom18, speaks about this new series, how Voot’s SVOD business has panned out, and much more.

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Elaborating on the TG for the show, Palia said, “This will essentially appeal to every Indian – male, female, young, old, metros and small towns. We are also going to put this out in regional languages. This is genuinely without any shield – one attempt to tell a real story that all of us believe a larger set of people would love to know. It is not a World Cup win, but it will also appeal to a global audience because genuinely it is a series of the greatest fightbacks ever; it is an underdog story. There was the glory behind something like a World Cup. We won the 1983 World Cup, we won the World Cup subsequent to that, One Day, T20, but this wasn’t a World Cup, it was not a tournament, it was a test series. The story needed to come through, it is not one big event that you can say this is the journey of India’s win at the 1983 or 2011 World Cups. This is a series and that’s why Neeraj was very keen on this story to be told because it is an insane story.”

He further added, “It will be interesting to see how this is received, because there are so many such events that happen. They may not necessarily be in the world of cricket, not even in the world of sports. There are very inspirational stories of teams, individuals, which can be told in different ways. You either recreate the whole thing or go more into the documentary space – docu-drama. You can do a four-episode series or you can do a film on it. What format we use will change depending on the kind of event it is, the kind of person or team or things like that.”

Talking about the idea behind the series, Palia shared, “We are very close with Neeraj and his team and it generally came up in the discussions that we must make something like this. All I received were five lines, there was no script. Neeraj is a super passionate man about cricket, but we were clear that something like this would only when the cricketers were willing to open up about what they went through. For a lot of them, it was traumatic and to be able to open up to somebody with that level of trauma, it has to be someone whom you know well or are comfortable with. Someone who will take care of the storytelling without resorting to sensationalism. We are going to tell the story the way it is and document it.”

On the strategy to expand the offerings, he said, “We got a lot of learnings over the last two years on what is working and what is not, the things that we could have done better, and how our audience will react to X versus Y kind of content. That has put us in a good state because the new slate that we will be putting up has all the learnings and instincts which we could have done in the initial content and it is very diverse.”

When asked about how the SVOD business has performed in the past two years, Palia said, “It has been phenomenal from what our expectations were to what we set out to do. Premium strategy is one of our advantages as there is a set of audiences who love Voot as a platform and have been coming to us for years. We presented them with a unique opportunity to upgrade and become members. We are seeing a phenomenal update from our existing base as well. We also have a lot of people who are not on the platform, because the kind of content that we are now putting out is not something that we did in the past. Each piece of content brings in different audiences. A lot of it was generated during the pandemic times, which brought in a lot of sampling, not just for us but for various other services as well. We were fortunate that we had a huge bulk of content, so we did not run out of content.”