MX Player aims to beat Netflix, Amazon Prime and ZEE5; confident of becoming No 1 by 2023

• With a recent funding of $110 million funding from Times Internet and Tencent, MX Player closed 2019 on a good note, however the challenge for the platform has been to get viewers to engage with its content library on a daily-basis.
• On the back of its varied content range, interactive content plan, and a mix of partnership content and originals, MX Player is hopeful of grabbing the number one spot in the OTT space soon.
• Gautam Talwar, Chief Content Officer, MX Player shares the next big plan for the platform in 2020.

For MX Player, 2019 ended on a rather good note. The platform’s web-series Queen, which was originally made in Tamil, saw an overwhelming response from other parts of the country. The series was later dubbed in Hindi, Bengali and Telugu. Post-launch, the platform saw an upsurge in its downloads on the Google app store and started trending on spot one for a week.

On the back of its varied content range that caters to different audiences across age groups, interactive content plan, and scale of users, MX Player is hopeful to be the number one player on every metric in a few years.

“I hope to be the absolute number one in the OTT segment in two-three years. We are second in line and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be on the top of the pile in three years. The scale of the app is very large and with all the metrics including watch-time and everything else, we should be galloping towards the number one position very soon,” expounds Gautam Talwar, Chief Content Player, MX Player.

It also received a $110 million funding from Times Internet and Tencent towards the end of 2019, helping it inch closer towards its goal of becoming the number one player.

Plan for the New Year

The home-grown platform has about 175 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and stands at 75 million on its Daily Active Users. This is where the bridge exists. While the number of app downloads and MAUs have increased dramatically, for MX Player, the challenge has been to get viewers to engage more with its content library on a daily-basis.

Therefore, in 2020, the agenda is to get its audience to watch more content on its platform.

“We have new audience coming in on a daily basis. The whole point is to make sure that they start watching our programs. We want to deliver to them the content that they want to watch, and for us, that is the real challenge, not really getting the downloads,” shares Talwar.

MX Player further aims to build a vast content library with interactive tools for its audience, to partner with more networks and launch 20 originals in different languages. Innovation and interaction are going to be another focus areas in 2020.

“I think with every product we put out into the market, there are massive improvements in the features of the product and we will keep improving them on a regular basis. Interactivity with the content, on the other hand, is going to be the next big trend for us. We're working very hard to ensure that our consumers interact with every piece of content that we launch,” adds Talwar.

As far as the advertisers are concerned, the platform has seen a steady growth there, too. “Overall, the platform is growing -- the numbers are growing, watch-time is growing -- there is no reason why advertisers should not follow,” says Talwar.

Content Marketing Strategy

Since its inception, the marketing strategy for MX Player has been 'Everytainment'. It provides a varied content library that caters primarily to Tier II and Tier III audiences. In 2019, originals such as Hey Prabhu!, Aafat, Hello Mini, Im'Mature, and Love Ok Please performed well for the platform.

Explaining the strategy behind these shows, Talwar said, “Every human being watches content basis a certain need gap -- a certain emotion that he wants to feed and therefore, we make sure that apart from the large shows that we have in the pipeline, we take this mood of the viewer into consideration, and then a programming and content strategy is followed to satiate that particular need gap. This is why we make sure that the programming is across genres. We understand our audience very well and try and build on that, and our marketing also reflects that.”

While the plan for the new year is yet to be set in motion, right now, MX Player is pinning its hopes on its latest launch ‘Queen.’