Demand for original content far exceeds the supply that we have today: SonyLIV business head Danish Khan

“I think the demand for original content far exceeds the supply that we have today. On an average, all the major OTT players put together are not putting up more than 10 shows per month, which is around 100 hours of content,” Danish Khan, executive vice president and business head of SonyLIV told ET. “For a country as large and as diverse as ours, I think there’s a huge amount of potential for more content and variety of content.”

He confirmed that overall, SonyLIV is going to release approximately 60 shows per year. “We will do around 18-20 series in Hindi and the rest will be in other languages, primarily Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali and Punjabi. Approximately, we’ll have five new releases in a month,” Khan said. “Also, there will be around three regional movies, so around 36 movies across three languages.”

With an average cost for one Hindi web-series at around Rs 30 crore and Rs 15 crore for the regional, the company is expected to spend over Rs 1,500 crore on content alone.

“While the first few years of the OTT explosion have seen a lot of high-quality content across platforms, we haven’t really seen a variety in the genres. For example, there are not too many shows for the age group of 14 to 18 years or 18 to 25… Also, there are not too many love stories or coming of age stories or family dramas. I think the expansion of this market will also depend on the supply of variety, both quantity and quality of the shows, but more importantly the variety of content for a variety of audiences.”

Khan added that there is an opportunity for every OTT platform in the country to expand the market.

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“If you look at the subscription split among male and female audiences currently, it is 80:20 in favour of males. Even from age group wise, it is 25 plus. The next level of expansion will be about getting a lot of females to watch OTT, to become OTT subscribers and also to get a lot of young adults to watch content on OTT,” he said.

SonyLIV, which celebrated two years last month after its complete revamp, has seen a massive jump in paid subscribers – from 700,000 two years back to over 18 million, which include 6.9 million direct subscribers, with an annual average revenue per user of Rs 573. It also has 6.1 million paid subscribers via bundled packs with services like

, and Tata Play. The ARPU from these subscribers, Khan said, is Rs 420, while the rest are from fixed deals with MX Player and Jio Fiber.

The company is also in talks with

Jio to activate a similar deal for the Jio mobile subscribers.

Khan believes that there is a readymade market of 20 million users, who are ready to pay for annual subscription, but most of them are underserved.

“Out of 350 million video consumers, there are 20 million users who won’t mind paying Rs 1,000 annually for OTT. That’s a Rs 2000 crore subscription revenue already available. And this market is looking at much more meaningful, cerebral content, which is told in a form that they’re able to get the authenticity and the context of the story. Unfortunately, 120-150 minutes of a movie cannot do justice to such subjects. Neither do the economics of television allow to tell such stories. So, a ‘Rocket Boys’ or ‘Scam’ or ‘Tabbar’ or ‘Maharani’ can possibly only be told on OTT. And it has a ready-made market according to us.”

The platform has recently greenlit an adaptation of ‘Freedom at Midnight’ by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, which tells the story of Indian independence and partition in 1947. Emmay Entertainment, which co-produced ‘Rocket Boys’, is working on the series, which is going to be the costliest production of SonyLIV.

The service will also release ‘Tanaav’, an adaptation of popular Israeli drama ‘Fauda’; Sudhir Mishra’s ‘Children of Freedom’, set against the backdrop of emergency; Vikas Bahl’s ‘Good Bad Girl’; Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Garmi; and subsequent seasons of ‘Rocket Boys’, ‘Scam’, Avrodh and others.

“OTT has done to video what Walkman did to music. Now the consumption of video is quite portable in nature. Today viewers are watching content in all shapes and forms – on a large screen, on a small screen, at home, or on the go. The consumption is going up and the best performing shows on TV are also doing extremely well on digital. So, my sense is that the world is moving towards a multi-platform consumption model, and we will have to adapt to it,” Khan said.

And to adapt to the model, SPN has a very different content monetisation strategy. While other OTT platforms have removed their content from YouTube or other digital platforms, SPN still offers some of its TV shows on YouTube after a 4–8-week delay.

“What do we put on YouTube is content, which can be monetised better in a shorter lifespan on TV,” said Khan who also heads SPN’s flagship channel Sony Entertainment Television. “The paid subscribers of SonyLIV get television content at the same time as their telecast on TV. Free users, or AVOD (advertising-video-on-demand) users get the same content after 48 hours, while it is offered on YouTube four to eight weeks later. This is the win-win strategy. We put only TV content, no original content, no sports on YouTube,” Khan said.

The company has syndication deals with Facebook and Twitter for short clips and is in talks with other platforms. It is learned that it earns around $50-55 million from such deals.

While Khan refused to share financial details, he said it’s a “very healthy” revenue and social media monetisation will remain the focus area – both in terms of long format and short format content.

“Everybody has their own strategy,” Khan added. “We have kept a few things exclusive for SonyLIV. So, originals and sports are two exclusive subscription drivers for us. Then there is television content, which we believe is not about owning the viewer but also expanding the reach of the content. If you see the partnerships like YouTube and Facebook because the consumption style is very different – people watch 5-10-minute clips – we don’t believe that viewership competes with either our television viewership or SonyLIV viewership. It actually increases the reach of the content and helps us monetise better.”