India is a diverse country when it comes to culture and languages. With more than 780 languages spoken in India, a variety of language content is available for consumption as users’ appetite for content continues to grow. According to a FICCI-EY report, regional OTT content volume of 55% exceeded Hindi language content by 45% for the first time in 2023. Additionally, the report suggests that the demand for premium OTT content will increase from around 3,000 hours to 4,000 hours by 2026. SVF Entertainment’s Hoichoi has claimed to be one of the few profitable OTT businesses in India, despite the existence of mainstream OTT platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+Hotstar and JioCinema, among others.
The parent company of Hoichoi, SVF Entertainment’s, revenue from operations rose 20.85% to Rs 153.23 crore in FY22 from Rs 121.27 crore in FY21, as per regulatory filings accessed by business intelligence platform, Tofler. Furthermore, the net profit grew by 35.53% to Rs 10.38 crore in FY22 from Rs 6.69 crore in FY21. Notably, the company’s majority of revenue from operations was from revenue from services which was Rs 150.77 crore in FY22 from Rs 120.44 crore in FY21, thereby recording a growth of 20.11%. In a conversation with BrandWagon Online, Soumya Mukherjee, COO, Hoichoi, talks about the company’s marketing strategies, its focus on originals and its future roadmap. (Edited Excerpts)
What are the marketing initiatives undertaken by the company? What are the new initiatives for FY25?
We started our seventh year last year in September. We have been very conscious of our marketing approach. We have focused heavily on keeping a big balance on our user acquisition cost. Revenue we have been earning is mostly invested back into content, 60-65% of profit and loss (PnL) is dedicated to content and we believe that creating content is the biggest marketing for the company. I think in the initial years, we used to do a lot of innovative branding campaigns, but over the years, we create content, be it our social media, or on the content marketing piece, we create content out of the existing content to promote ourselves. Our marketing is heavily dependent on our internal content marketing team, which is essentially a team of creators, people around graphics and edits, who take the hero content, which is essentially our series or movies and create more innovative short format content out of that, which in turn helps us market the product better.
Is the company focussing more on content acquisition or on producing more originals? What is the average monthly active users for the company across devices?
The average monthly users would also depend on the type of business we are in. We are primarily talking about users who are paying money to watch content, that number would roughly be in five to six million zones across devices every month. Apart from that, we have different indirect partnerships which we do not count as a monthly active user base. However, that also contributes significantly to multi-millions.
We are more focused on creating original content because, for the last five to six years, we have been consistently delivering 24-28 original shows every year, including creating original content in India and Bangladesh. Having said that, from our content acquisition standpoint, our primary goal has always been to bring forward the biggest theatrical releases that West Bengal sees. I think in the initial years, we put together a very strong effort in curating the best of Bengali movies, going back five to six decades. Our strategy going forward is that while we have a big library of content, we want to focus now on bringing almost all the biggest theatrical releases that happen in the Bengali market.
How has the company’s collaboration with JioCinema worked out? How has the company benefited from bundling with telecom operators?
We have had two to three strategic relationships. We are available with Airtel, where we are bundled across all their offerings from DTH broadband to mobiles. We have a similar association with Jio which goes one step further because with Jio, we are bundled with their broadband mobility. We have partnered with them on the Hindi dubbed pieces, hence being a much deeper partnership because that helps us reach out to the last-mile consumers and not restrict us to the Bengali demographic, but also to the Hindi demographic. We have been closely working on the bundle with Jio for the last two and a half years while for the Hindi dubbing pieces for one year and the numbers are very good.
While international expansion has been successful for Hoichoi, is there any particular niche the company wants to tap? How has the company benefitted from dubbing content?
Dubbing content is a big revenue source for us. In India, all our series are dubbed in Hindi, and we have strategic partnerships which help us distribute the Hindi-dubbed content to the Indian user base. Our strategy is to dub every new original show that we make. We ensure that we also release the Hindi version, either simultaneously or after a month from its release. We have around 150 original shows which have already been dubbed in Hindi and every year, we release around 30 shows. The volume will keep on increasing year by year. We have also started experimenting by dubbing in other languages like Tamil but we are taking that slow.
What are the future aspirations of the company? With Hoichoi introducing freemium in India, how has it worked out for the company?
The freemium model is good because the objective behind the freemium model was always to incorporate brands. We are still not showcasing ads on Hoichoi, but we are creating content for the brands, in our style, because we approach it slightly differently. We take a brand’s problem and try to promote it while creating fiction content that which goes well with our audience base.
Apart from that, there are other big plans around diversifying content because we are looking to experiment with certain formats. It could be bite-sized content, a new monetisation model, as well as it could be around exploring different formats of content. These are a couple of things which are in the pipeline at the same time, we are diversifying because we have started creating our theatrical movies. One of those was released back in September and this year, we plan to release another two movies. Primarily we are more focused on maintaining and retaining the core base and it is important because I think Hoichoi is one of the only profitable OTT platforms in the country and we want to continue maintaining that.
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