Vishnu Mohta on hoichoi’s UAE foray plans, pricing policy, looking beyond Bangla

Hoichoi, India’s biggest vernacular OTT platform, has marked the beginning of its 7th year with a plethora of new titles for the upcoming year, with A-lister talent and creators and also, unveiled new business development in the works.

hoichoi has witnessed a significant 60% increase of Individual Watchtime per subscriber since last year. Users’ time spent on hoichoi has increased by 60% compared to last year. Hoichoi also has seen a 55% growth in Direct Subscriptions.

As hoichoi continues to add quality content in its repertoire, the platform has clocked a 200% rise in Monthly Active Users and a 40% rise in International Subscriber base. The platorm’s Refresh Rate has gone up to 6-7 titles per month which is the highest by any single language content platform.

Plans of expanding to the Middle East have been in the cards for hoichoi, and an official hard launch has been scheduled in the UAE and Saudi Arabia by end of this year with a fresh pricing plan, an extensive marketing push and a content programming suitable with the sentiments and entertainment laws pertaining to each country.

Content Syndication in various partner platforms for vernacular distribution is an important strategy being followed by hoichoi for the last few years and they are amping up their game for this, going forward. Recently, hoichoi has partnered with JioCinema for its Hindi dubbed content. One of the key strategic approaches this year would be exploring this further and try to have content available in more languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, with certain partners.

Vishnu Mohta, Co-Founder, hoichoi

What kind of an environment had you faced while launching hoichoi and how it has evolved in these six years? What have been the key milestones in these six years?

I think we started with a very simple idea, which is we felt that content was going to go the digital route and people were going to consume content on the Internet. And because the preceding 20 years we were a film and television content producer, we felt that we could have a unique take on how content gets created and monetised using all that experience and the catalog of content that we had the intellectual property for. So, we started with that idea and we felt that the web was an emerging content format and we could make a real play for it. And this time instead of being just a content creator, we wanted to be a platform. Because we were very long-term in our approach towards doing it, as all the content that we were creating and acquiring was premium in nature. We felt that the only way to monetise it for us properly was going to be through advertisements, through subscriptions. And that’s the route we took. It was pretty much seven to eight years back, subscriptions in India were really something that was almost very difficult to believe, that India would ever pay for content. And it continues to be the case, I think. It’s not as if we’ve reached every nook and cranny of the country or across the world to be able to get people to pay for content. And that’s just the nature of the beast. It’s an evolution of habits. It’s an evolution of people’s inclination to consume content through the Internet and different form factors. Having said that, we took the right call in terms of being subscription-driven. Besides, being focused on one language allowed us to create a very deep catalog of content. Instead of trying to do multiple things in multiple languages, we were very focused on reaching out to a specific cohort of people who speak a particular language. And that applies to people who belong to India, belong to Bangladesh, and the diasporas of the two countries. This entire focus has enabled us in a subscription business – you have to create like television creates excitement every single day by creating new content as a minimum, we set ourselves up a target of creating new content at least every week.

Ultimately every single week there’ll be a customer who will be renewing his subscription at some point. So, we wanted to ensure that the excitement and the brand recollection was very high and we had to give something for every single weekend for people, which we managed to maintain over the last six years.

I think it was a very brave decision at that time to, going for a single language.

At that time, we had the Netflixes and Amazons of the world that were offering global content here, some dubbed in Indian languages, but mostly in Hindi and English. So, what made you exactly go for a single language? What kind of potential did you see at that time?

We’ve been a single language company for that matter for years. It is one thing we know well and we are automatically always defaulted to that. We’ve always believed in the power of language content. We continue to believe language will be one of the key reasons why content differentiation will continue to happen.

Now we are talking about South movies and South content and all of that, but they’ve always existed. It’s just that the world is waking up to great content that people are making in other regional languages as well. But I think what we tend to forget is in India, it is not one country, it is I think 30 or 40 countries almost. For example, Bengali is the fifth or the sixth most spoken language, depending on the source that you look at, by more than 250,000,000 people globally. And 250,000,000 people is a very large number. So, in our specific use case, Bangladesh as a country speaks only Bengali and from an Indian contextual point of view, we always think of Bengali as something that is spoken in West Bengal. But what is a little bit missed is that Bangladesh is a full country of 180,000,000 people, and speaks Bengali as a language, which is what makes it closer to the fifth largest spoken language. So we started with that and we felt that even if we are able to convert, we wanted to believe that in 10, 20, 30 years time frame, we want to reach out to every single customer who speaks Bengali and add them as a subscriber of the platform.

That's a large sizable business if you manage to do that. Now you’ve given us hoichoi’s journey so far and how it has gone on to become India’s biggest vernacular OTT platform today. Could you also share some insights into the growth of the overall OTT industry?

I think for most of us, the pandemic as a phenomenon is long forgotten now. And rightly so, all that the Pandemic period in March, April, and May 2020 offered was just enabling that mass experiment, should I call it, mass discovery of things to happen, which would have taken a couple of more years to happen. People who would not have consumed digital content had started doing that because of being stuck at home, etc. So, I think that it offered the ability for people to discover various platforms. Having said that, though, it’s now been almost 3+ years to what you call as peak lockdown, first lockdown. I think from our perspective, we’re tracking to being double that size on average every month, even when people were in March or April 2020. So, I don’t think we are looking to slow down. I don’t think things have slowed down at all. Yes, as I said, it offered a lot of tailwinds for things and accelerated the awareness and the consumption of digital content. But at least what we observe is that as a company, we’ve been growing about 40%, 45% to 50% annually. From a direct revenue point of view, we see that going. We are in the very initial stages of what you call a digital pay ecosystem especially. And we’ve got a massive population as a country and as a language. We’ve not even scratched the surface of what is possible. And I think this is something that will play out. And we hope to be in this for the next 10, 20, 30 years, if not more. We're very long-term term focussed. We’re not a platform that is priced extremely cheaply. We charge Rs 1000 per year, which is in line with a lot of Indie language OTTs or national languages OTTs, because we offer depth of content in that one language.

You just mentioned Rs 1000 a year, but we have seen kind of an opposite trend which is going on with even amongst the global OTT players who are reducing their subscription rates, taking some of their content out from the paywall and offering them for free. They’re coming out with short-duration payment models as well. The freemium model is also picking up a lot. So, amidst such a scenario, how has hoichoi managed to see 55% growth in direct subscriptions? Where has this growth come from?

It has come from, as I said, extreme focus on content, extreme focus on consistency of content. What I would say is that every company has its strategy, how they want to approach it, and what time frame they want to approach it in. Like I said, it’s a very evolving ecosystem and everybody is trying to experiment. In fact, in the last year to two years we would have increased prices from Rs 600 a year to Rs 1000 per year. Because we believe that we are only going to survive in the next 10 to 20 years if we are profitable as a company and we make cash as a company. We are not in it for market share only. We are in it for the brasstacks business. We continue to believe that this is going to make business sense, which is why we chose the subscription model in the first place. We always found the advertisement side to be extremely difficult to do from the very beginning and very concentrated on very few global players. And that’s what we’ve seen play out. Everybody who was advertisement-driven now has got at least a premium or a premium tier. And now we’re again going back to some platforms offering sports for free, which is again fine. I think, as I said, everybody’s got a very different strategy and everybody is right in their way of reaching out or their metrics are a little bit different. As I said, our metrics remain that we want to be reasonably profitable as an entity. So hoichoi, as a platform, has also witnessed an increase in its watch time per subscriber. 60% is the kind of growth that has happened here since last year.

How is this growth happening and what is the average time that a subscriber spends on the platform?

I think the watch time growth is down to content. Again, we continue to focus not on marketing, but especially on content and thereafter technology. In the last year, we’ve revamped all our key applications like Android, TV applications, websites, etc,. And that revamp entirely was written from the ground up with all the learnings that we had in the preceding five years in terms of understanding what the pain points were, what were the things that were going to make customers sticky, etc. The second thing is all the learning. The best part about our digital business is that you’ve got massive amount of learnings that come from everything that you release, from the data that you capture, the customer feedback that you capture, etc. And we try to put that back into what we create. So, that helps in a lot of ways.

And again, as I said, we are probably the largest catalog of a single language content OTT in the country. Maybe we’ve made 150-plus original shows. We continue to make about 25 to 30 shows every year. According to me, this particular continuous focus has enabled people to expect and form habits around defaulting when they want to think about Bengali content, which was the overall objective anyway. Those are the kinds of things that move the metrics on watch time and stickiness and a lot of other things. I would say content plus technology makes a big difference in that, so content here is the king.

How do you see the content consumption trends amongst Indian consumers? What is working out in the Indian context? How content discovery is happening, and most importantly, how is content differentiation happening?

It is very difficult to make a generalised statement. I think some of those things that you mentioned are things that we already started with – working with marquee directors, marquee actors, etc. The relationships that we forged, that entrenched ability to understand what consumers want, being able to work with the biggest names and biggest crews, etc., that was something that we perfected over 20 years and preceding that also. I think that’s why we were uniquely positioned to make a play in this market. And this is why we decided to go direct digital. If we didn’t have the preceding years, we would not be where we are today. So, I always think that you have to think about it not as a six-year journey or a seven-year journey, you have to think about it as a 25-year journey.

A lot of things are panning out. I think it’s difficult to say that there is only one particular trend that’s happening. I don’t think there’s anything that’s extremely unique. I think people are trying to tell unique stories in unique fashions, so I don’t think there’s any specific trend. Everybody is starting to work with the biggest actors or the biggest directors or only one particular kind of content, etc.

I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as that right now when it comes to content differentiation. So, how challenging is it to bring that about in a scenario that is getting increasingly crowded? Content businesses are very challenging, not just here, but everywhere in the world. Because it is not like making a factory, where you’ve made a super factory and you just continue to replicate that in 100 other locations.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that and it is not very scalable from that perspective. So, that’s a challenging part of the business, which creates a defense mechanism also for people who can do this. And it’s not very replicable easily. I think that is also a challenge, but at the same time as a defensible strategy for any company that understands content from the inside out and who just sees content first in every spectrum. So, I think the advantage we have is that we started as a film producer and a television content producer and then moved on to a platform business and spent a huge amount of time making 150-plus movies and a lot of that came into play when we were thinking about web content in the first place.

Frankly, it’s not something that we’ve been very bothered by, at least in the market that we operate in, we are the largest by far. But I think scale is again not a key metric of content businesses. You don’t get economies of scale out of just by being large. People are also always chasing the best ideas and the best slate of content. As long as we continue to do that, we’ll operate well. If others continue to do that, that’s great because the market in itself will expand, the consumption habit will expand and that’s important in a relatively nascent ecosystem.

So, I think we worry about competition way too much. In this particular segment, which is digital OTT content, I think we’re in very early stages of evolution of a particular industry growth on an overall level. And it is more about how you become. It’s not about how you eat into another person’s pie. It’s about how you increase the size of the pie. And that’s how we approach it at the behavioral change level.

Hoichoi has built up a very formidable content library in its six-year journey so far. When it comes to your content strategy, what are the key points that hoichoi keeps in mind while selecting the kind of content it brings to its viewers, what it curates, and the kind of narratives that it brings in? So how exactly do you go about this process of content selection? What do your viewers want to watch? How do you target that?

I think it’s a combination of art and science, in that I think ultimately we are backing an idea of a creator and we want to stay true to that idea and the vision that the creator has. We try to understand and layer that with our understanding of the experience of what the community wants to watch in general. And thirdly, I would say equally important is what we’ve learned from the data that we have of all the customers, all the shows, and all the things that have happened during the six years. We’ve got data for everything. So, that’s the differential in a platform business. We’re able to especially be the digital business, where it’s not working on a sample, but it’s working on 100% absolute data.

It’s not like television, where you’re working on a smaller sample, but here you know every single customer interaction and customer habit, and you’re able to glean a lot of information and learnings from that. We try to put that back into what we create in the period going forward. So, I think it’s a combination of all the three factors. It’s human plus data that comes into play.

Ever since JioCinema came into the market, it has been disrupting the space. Could you share some insights as to what are the major changes that JioCinema is bringing about, especially in the OTT space?

I would not like to talk about someone else, although they are a very close partner. I think JioCinema and Network18, TV18, Viacom18 – the entire spectrum is a very deep partnership, where we are working across the spectrum of things. On the SVF side, we’re working on film production from a collaboration point of view. We are co-investing in films together and they’re a partner for licensing of all the movies that we’ve made in SVF over a period of time. They’re all licensed to Colors today as part of that spectrum of that company group.

This is more sort of a strategic initiative to license our dubbed content, which we’ve already created into their platform, which is more ad-centric today, but is continuing to be more hybrid. But at the same time, I think they make a play in a lot of other languages that we don’t necessarily want to operate out of. We were with MX Player before this until they had their own set of issues. And JioCinema is the partner that followed, because it is very difficult to get a library of about 50 quality original shows in a particular language. This partnership is a meeting of common goals. We don’t operate in their space, they don’t operate in our space, and I think it overlaps very well. We are able to help each other meet our objectives, which is where this comes in.

Are there any plans to foray into sports streaming?

No, not yet. I won’t say ever, but we just see the economics of sports as being extremely expensive today. I don't think we have the specialisation. In the first place, we have always focused on long-format content and video on demand. We continue to believe that’s the right fit for our base. We’ve always been about getting IP that has a long tail as opposed to live image, etc.

Right now, the OTT industry has been rife with conversations about additional regulations that are being planned. What is your take on the regulatory aspect in the OTT space? How will it impact OTT content and creativity in the months in the times to come?

I think we’ve had very healthy dialogues with the regulators and different departments. And this is panned out of the last year to two years, where we had this legislation around self-regulation that came out and as responsible companies and responsible citizens, I think no OTT who has got a long-term horizon wants to hurt sentiments or people’s sensitivities around different things. That’s not the business that we are in, especially as a long-term player, you don’t want to be anywhere close to that.

But a mechanism to govern that was very important, which is where the self-regulation prescribed format came out. And I think it’s very healthy and follows industry practices, global practices around how self-regulation can be an effective medium to ensure that there’s a win-win between regulator, platform, and customer. And at least whatever I’ve seen of the people who are part of various groups like IMI and IBDF, etc., and all that has been very responsive to any customer issue that has come up and everybody is sensitive to that.

I would say this part, there are certain things that happen, but I think at least there’s a mechanism to ensure that they are undone either by the person themselves or by a governing body, which includes justices of various courts, high courts, or Supreme Court. I think that mechanism enables you to ensure that things can be rectified even if there’s a mistake at some point and there’s a review mechanism somewhere or the other. It is very democratic in nature if you think about it.

(With additional inputs by Madhurima Kar).