Zee Entertainment's streaming platform ZEE5 is ramping up its Tamil language content for 2022 and plans to launch 20 films and series—12 originals and seven to eight movie premieres. The platform offered three Tamil originals last year.
Doubling down on Tamil content, the over the top (OTT) platform is also increasing investment. "Investments in Tamil and Telugu have gone up by 3x," Manish Kalra, chief business officer, ZEE5 India, told Moneycontrol.
"We see that there is higher intent to pay amid Tamil Nadu audience and 80 percent consumption of Tamil-language content is happening in the state,” he said.
This year, the focus would be on Tamil, Telugu and Bengali content, Kalra said. While ZEE5’s 60 percent viewership comes from Hindi, 20 percent comes from Tamil and the platform is looking to scale it up because of an increase in both viewership and subscribers coming for Tamil content.
"People in Tamil Nadu they love their stars. When we released Ajith-starrer Valimai, we saw good spike in subscriptions. When we launched original series called Vilangu we saw strong subscription trend. Tamil Nadu audience is willing to pay for subscriptions and the intent to pay is equal or more as compared to Hindi market," Kalra said.
Valimai, which premiered on the platform in March, recorded 500-million streaming minutes on ZEE5 worldwide.
Vocal for local
The platform this year will offer Prakash Raj's drama series Anantham, director Vijay’s teen dance drama Five-Six-Seven-Eight, director, screenwriter, and producer Vetrimaaran's first original series Nilamellam Ratham among others.
In Q3 FY22, Zee5 revenue grew 24 percent year-on-year (YoY) to Rs 1,459 million. The platform reported 101.9 million global monthly active users (MAU), up 55 percent YoY, and 9.6 million global daily active users (DAU), up 78 percent YoY.
ZEE5 had released 11 original shows and movies in the third quarter, enabling subscription revenue growth.
However, the platform, which has around six million subscribers, has around 13 percent market share in the subscription video on-demand (SVOD) space with Disney+Hotstar and Netflix leading the way with a market share of 26.3 percent and 25.3 percent, respectively.
To improve viewership and subscription, the platform is launching more content, especially on the regional side focusing more on Tamil and Telugu content.
It is estimated that the share of languages other than Hindi and English will increase to 54 percent of the total content produced, as regional OTTs flourish and scale on the back of dubbing and subtitling, said EY FICCI 2022 report. It added that this could also lead to increased costs for regional content production.
Share of Hindi language content dropped from 70 percent in 2020 to 53 percent last year while share of other languages increased from 27 percent in 2020 to 48 percent last year.
Also, it is estimated that out of the original shows produced, the share of regional content has increased to 50-60 percent in recent times compared to 20 percent three to four years ago.
"Most large platforms adopted a strategy of eight languages (Hindi, four southern languages, Bengali, Marathi, English) or more. Dubbing and subtitling of movies across Indian languages led to further experimentation and acceptance of movies across state and cultural boundaries," the report said.
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