ZEE5 Global adds on more languages
In a move to meet the burgeoning demand for South Asian content in the United States, video streaming platform ZEE5 Global – home to blockbusters like RRR, Kashmir Files and Gadar 2 – has announced a pivot towards aggregation. With the launch of ZEE5 Global Add-ons, the platform will now include content from several smaller OTT players to its library. They include Oho Gujarati, Simply South, NammaFlix (Kannada), iStream (Malayalam), Chaupal (Punjabi, Haryani, Bhojpuri), and Epic On. More partnerships are in the works.
This is the first time ZEE5 will have Gujarati and Haryanvi content on its platform.
The announcement was made at an event in Mumbai on November 28.
Easy access to content on a single app
According to New York-based Archana Anand, chief business officer, ZEE5 Global, this will give the diaspora audience easy access to relevant South Asian content on a single app, cure “subscription fatigue” and help the partner platforms reach a wider audience in the U.S. Streaming is a highly competitive business with soaring marketing, content and technology costs. In the U.S market, the cost of audience acquisition is upwards of $90 per customer.
ZEE5 entered the United States in 2021. “We came in from behind. Today I am 15 times ahead of my nearest competition,” Anand told India Currents, citing data.ai (formerly App Annie) data.
“We did some really cool tactical things,” she said, referencing ZEE5’s tie-up with the North American Association of Indian Students, collaboration with Patel grocery stores, and Bollywood dance competitions organized by her team across 150 universities. “We used traditional brick-and-mortar marketing to push an online product,” she said. “That was our initial foray of making sure ZEE5 gets evangelized.”
A large library of content
She said, “Indian students in the US are on student loans, they struggle, they’re missing their Indian entertainment and news. We started giving them the subscription at a special student rate; all they had to do was show their student ID and they would have access to it.”
Anand is not threatened by older streaming platforms in the U.S. market, despite their growing libraries of South Asian shows and movies. “I don’t remotely see them as rivals,” she said.
They’re not actively catering to the South Asian audience, she said. “It’s not curated for you. Within their enormous library it is just a piece of content. You may stumble upon it,” she said. The discoverability and personalization of Indian language shows and movies on ZEE5 is her biggest strength, she said.
Scattered Audience, Many Tongues
Anand’s pie of South Asian consumers in the U.S. is linguistically diverse and geographically fragmented, and can be sliced in several ways. Moreover, there are immigrant Indians who’re different from born-and-raised Indian Americans. How does she tailor her product for such a heterogenous desi diaspora?
“I don’t tailor my product; I tailor my content,” she said. “So, my recommendations and notifications are where my cohort-based marketing comes up.” She’s also mindful of the difference between her audience in India versus her audience in Bharat, a marketing classification based on audiences in large cities and small towns that has made its way into the vocabulary of executives in the entertainment business.
About the diaspora’s language-based preferences, she said, “Texas has a large gulti audience, North-based content is popular in the tri-state area given the large Punjabi and Gujarati population there, the Bay Area is Tam-heavy.”
Despite these demographic differences, Indians in the U.S. have one big similarity. They’re all “very, very eager to catch content at the same time as (their) India counterparts,” according to Anand.
‘A new time for South Asians’
One of Anand’s goals in the new year is to make South Asian content mainstream. “I saw some hints of that when we launched RRR and I want to see more of that,” she said.
“I want to change the narrative of ‘the South Asian,’ which is already happening now in real life. I want to see it happen in reel life,” she said, referring to the markedly Western sensibilities that birthed the ‘awkward brown guy’ trope in American media, like Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from The Simpsons and, more recently, Raj Koothrappali from The Big Bang Theory.
“We’re living in an age of Rishi Sunak and Ajay Banga. Three people in the presidential race are of Indian origin,” Anand said. “It is a new time for South Asians. It’s our time now. Our stories have to reflect that.”