This year, we will focus on ensuring the best-in-class regional content library and technology on the platform and aim at going deeper into Tier II & III markets: Manish Kalra, Zee5

• As it celebrated it 4th anniversary recently, Zee5 revealed that its monthly active users (MAU) rose to 101.9 million and global daily active users (DAUs) touched 9.6 million in December 2021.
• Moving forward, the OTT platform is working on ensuring it goes deeper into the country, into Tier II & III markets, and is also working on strengthening the platform on the technology front, to make sure even people with low-end phone or patchy networks can access it without any difficulty.

Zee5, the over-the-top (OTT) platform from the house of Zee, has plans of doubling down on its investments on original content production this year. The platform is also working towards building one of the best regional content library in the country, Manish Kalra, Chief Business Officer, ZEE5 India told us.

As it celebrated it 4^th anniversary recently, the platform revealed that its monthly active users (MAU) rose to 101.9 million and global daily active users (DAUs) touched 9.6 million in December 2021. It also said that its users watched an average of 201 minutes of content per month during the last quarter, and it released 51 shows and movies, including 11 originals during the period.

“We are fundamentally a highly customer-obsessed business and our success lies in more and more users using our platform. In December, globally, Zee5 crossed the 100 million MAU benchmark which was very exciting for us and we want to keep going from strength to strength. In 2020, we had almost seen a 2X increase on our user base on subscription side and even in 2021, we have seen high double digit growth in subscriber base. We’ve almost doubled our subscriber base YoY which has been very rewarding for us. We are also seeing a lot of people moving to connected devices, there’s been an increase in users coming in from regional languages. So it's been a rewarding journey for us so far,” shared Kalra.

Currently, close to 80% of Zee5’s users are Tier I and metro-focused, but this year, the platform wants to go deeper into Tier II and Tier III cities. “Our strategy would be to go local with the right content offerings. We have some big investments planned in regional languages including Tamil, Telugu, Bangla and Punjabi, along with Hindi. We will come up with real, relatable stories that will connect with the masses. We want to ensure we go deeper into the country and acquire and take care of this audience in a much more significant way,’ he added.

To celebrate its anniversary, the platform had granted access to a select few of its premium web series and movies to everyone for free. It also announced ZEE5 Spark, an initiate aimed at bolstering the platform’s AVOD content library further by introducing some popular web series like Holiday, Ready 2 Mingle, Dude, The Great Indian Wedding, Happily Ever After, featuring actors like Aahana Kumra, Amol Parashar, Adah Sharma, Priyank Sharma and Naveen Kasturia. Zee5 will also add short films like Baarish Aur Chowmein, Half Full, Khujli, Kheer and many more, starring actors like Taapsee Pannu, Naseeruddin Shah, Anupam Kher, Neena Gupta and Jackie Shroff amongst others that will be available for AVOD users under Spark.

On some of their key areas of focus for the year, Kalra said, “We want to ensure we become the best-in-class on technology from the platform perspective. We want to become more intuitive and drive a more personalized and customized interface for every user. Secondly, we want to invest on having the best-in-class regional content library because that's our strength and forte. We don’t want to compete in the English genre. So staying focused on our rules, our strengths and investing on a class content library for Indians and the languages that they connect with would be super important for us. We also want to ensure that we stay rooted and connected with India. So, we want to ensure we are available even for consumers who are on low-end devices and do not have great network. So you will soon see some innovations from us on offline viewing and on closed network,” concluded Kalra.