The next gen entertainment will be experienced in a parallel universe: Dilip Chandra

Owned by Arha Media & Broadcasting Pvt Ltd, Aha is a regional OTT platform making an impact in Telugu and Tamil content. It offers a multifaceted experience, including Live Channels, Gaming, and more. As per media reports, Aha is now set to launch the first virtual channel in the General Entertainment genre, bringing linear television to the OTT space.

In an interaction with Adgully, Dilip Chandra, Vice President of Product and Analytics, Aha, speaks at length on Virtual Channels, an innovative concept poised to redefine entertainment by combining traditional television with on-demand streaming.

What motivated aha to venture into Casual Games, and what unique value do you believe they bring to your platform?

As per industry reports, India is now the world’s 2nd biggest gaming user market, wherein approximately 40% of it is attributed to Casual gaming (like Candy Crush and Ludo King). This market potential coupled with significant demographic of younger audience is the motive behind venturing into this content format. Engagement in the form of app visits frequency and time spent will boost with a right content strategy.

Live Channels are becoming increasingly popular. How do you see them fitting into the Aha platform, and what can users expect from this feature?

Our understanding of Live channels roots from the behaviour of linear consumption of an Indian customer. Termed as a Virtual channel, this digital first Live channel has the potential to bring the convenience and familiarity of traditional linear television programming to our user base, thereby drawing a larger demographic pool of user traffic into Aha’s ecosystem. This entails curating our exclusive aha content to align with the behavioral patterns of our customers, offering them a linear experience within the framework.

The upcoming launch of Virtual Channels is an exciting development. Could you share some details about what users can anticipate and how this innovation aligns with Aha’s vision?

Adding to above, the concept of Virtual channels aligns with our constant endeavour to bring wide variety of content formats to our customers through different distribution mediums. Aha’s vision is to reach every possible household in its operating markets.

With the rapid growth of streaming services, how does aha plan to differentiate itself and stay competitive in the market?

Our brand positioning of 100% Regional (Telugu and Tamil so far) fundamentally differentiates us from the rest of market. Our core focus in understanding the respective markets and, more importantly, our target audience is backed by primary and secondary data, thanks to our in-house robust data infrastructure, which offers a competitive edge. The insights translate into building effective strategies across functions like content, marketing and pricing.

Could you elaborate on any key challenges you’ve faced while implementing these new initiatives and how your team has overcome them?

Some of our new initiatives include User interactivity, Casual games, Short form (aha Minis), Virtual channels, etc. Most of them are technology driven initiatives, which pose challenges to identify/ build a solution and integrate them in a methodical workflow that can deliver impact. Our talented Product and skilful engineering teams have normalised the end output despite varied application libraries and data structures, to ensure seamless end user experience.

Take an example of Aha Minis, where we have linked both short and long forms of our content. Imagine integrating two different solutions with different tech stacks resting on different Cloud infra providers, but offer a seamless end user experience.

How do you customise recommendations for individual users to provide a personalised viewing experience?

Personalisation is the need of the hour. Our recommendations are powered by a hybrid methodology of Collaborative and Content based filtering thanks to a great deal of data points that we capture in real time. However, the current state of recommendations needs to go hyper-personalised in today’s world, especially, as we venture into new contents formats like short form content. We are working on building a solution from two perspectives – Cohortisation of our users, basis robust data infrastructure, and In-depth video consumption analysis using Generative AI + metdata enrichment.

User engagement and retention are critical in the streaming industry. Could you share some strategies aha employs to keep users engaged and coming back for more?

Agree. Content is the king, thereby our starting point is to ensure a strong Content pipeline backed by data backed strategy. Our ability to profile our users using a variety of variables of engagement, interests, demographics, devices, etc., empowers to tailor personalised communication to macro/ micro user cohorts. Content formats like Movies, Web series, LiveTV, Casual Games, aha Minis and now Virtual channels offer plethora of entertainment choices to wide spectrum of audiences. Enabled by a thoughtful pricing strategy to appeal from a Mobile-only to Living room premium experiences like 4K and Dolby.

Finally, looking ahead, what are your long-term goals and vision for Aha’s product and analytics department, and how do you see it shaping the future of the streaming industry?

We at Aha believe technology and data are strong enablers of any digital native organisations, like video streaming industry. The long term goal of product is to deliver hyper personalised superior user experience to our customers ranging from hinterland to urban land and gamify the experience with aspects like communities, live chats, interactive games, etc. For analytics, the goal is to make Data science main stream that can efficiently drive business critical decisions.

The new age technologies like Generative AI and Big data stacks will be disruptive in nature. The next generation entertainment will be experienced in a parallel universe that is completely different from what it is today!