The pandemic and the resulting Coronavirus lockdown played a crucial role in scaling up content consumption in the OTT space. The lockdown phase acted as a catalyst in shifting content availability to digital, based on the evolving consumption habits of the viewer who is now constantly available on digital touch points, converting fence-sitters to subscribers.

“One of the major content consumption trends we’ve seen this year is that earlier 60% of our consumers would come from the top tier 1 cities, and 40% would come from tier 2 and 3 in the months preceding the lockdown. Now it’s the opposite,” notes Nachiket Pantvaidya, CEO, ALT Balaji and group COO, Balaji Telefilms.

In addition, the audience mindset has drastically changed, with the desire to pay for quality content. This is bound to create large audience pools whether for original content, movies, music, news, games or sports.

“It redefined entertainment in the sense that it made cinema accessible to people in a very difficult year. The OTT industry has challenged us also to think outside the box, think of narratives that push creative boundaries,” shares producer Anand Pandit, whose film The Big Bull is headed to the web.

In terms of viewership, business, subscription, and acquisition of projects for the platforms, there has been a massive change this year for digital platforms. “Our active subscription grew 2.6 times versus November 2019. Our engagement grew 1.3 times and average subscription grew three times. The preferred language was Hindi, followed by Telugu. The preferred genre was crime and thriller,” a ZEE5 spokesperson shared.

Consumers had been used to one kind of entertainment habit — going to the theatre for a weekend movie and/or sitting in front of TV. But when fresh content stopped coming to the TV and theatres shut for months, it broke the inertia about OTT. “We posted a growth of 6.9 million paid subscribers which is the largest six-month growth for us ever,” says Ali Hussein, CEO, Eros Now India.

Ferzad Palia, head of Voot Select, Youth, Music and English Entertainment, Viacom18, says, “Even after lockdown was lifted, we see good growth across the board, both ad supported business and subscription business. We also shot and created the world’s first full-blown series from home — The Gone Game.” Based on these positive trends, it will be interesting to see if this growth trajectory will continue in the future as well.