MUMBAI: ALTBalaji, one of the country’s leading homegrown OTT platforms, has completed three years, continuing to break new ground and setting milestones on its way to further success.
On the back of an extensive, diverse content library that spans multiple genres, the platform has established a niche for itself in the originals space and played a vital role in inculcating an individual binge-watching habit amongst Indian audiences. Owing to its resounding mass appeal, ALTBalaji has emerged as the fastest-growing homegrown platform with more than 60 originals to its name and aims to curate more in the coming days.
Since its inception, ALTBalaji has been able to stay well ahead of the curve and grab the audience’s attention through its unique narratives, innovative business strategies, and clutter-breaking original Hindi content. Growing from strength to strength, ALTBalaji has today become a major player in the Indian OTT industry and gains further encouragement by the massive spike in subscribers. With a plethora of original content that keeps viewers thoroughly entertained, ALTBalaji has consistently ranked number three in the list of top grossing video streaming apps in the country across the app store (Source: App Annie).
Adopting a completely different strategy to its competitors in terms of content creation, partnerships or marketing, ALTBalaji is well on its way to profitability. Witnessing its costs getting controlled in the first half of fiscal 2020 and the loss margin further reducing at the end of the current fiscal, the platform aims to break even in 2020-21. With content being ALTBalaji’s biggest differentiator, the platform has reached out to all kinds of audiences across the length and breadth of the country through a healthy mix of thriller, drama, romance, teenage drama, horror, and comedy, among others.
Giving importance in growing its regional subscriber base, the leading OTT player has a host of its Hindi offerings dubbed in Indian as well as foreign languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bahasa, and Arabic, amongst others. In their endeavor to engage the audience and offer them an immersive viewing experience, ALTBalaji is also working towards strengthening its UI/UX by focusing on aspects like language interface, voice search, targeted retention strategies, tailored recommendations, quick onboarding, and convenient payment gateways.
“ALTBalaji, since its inception, has served as a flag-bearer for clutter-breaking original content and shall continue to do so. Being from the house of Balaji Telefilms, which have been catering to the audiences' ever-changing preferences for over 25 years now, ALTBalaji has an advantage like no other with a deeper understanding and familiarity with the viewer’s consumption preferences. By constantly working on an effective content strategy to cater to individuals, we aim to ramp up our original offerings at an exciting pace. Our core focus right now is to capture the Hindi-speaking market through our innovative content offerings along with expanding our regional language content library in the coming years. As we set sights towards breaking even in this new year, we shall continue to keep our viewers as the focal point, build our strategies around them and cement our position as a market leader in the industry,” ALTBalaji CEO and Balaji Telefilms group COO Nachiket Pantvaidya said.
ALTBalaji has been a pioneer in starting the trend of original soundtracks in the web-series space. In addition, ALTBalaji also launched some interesting and innovative initiatives; naming a few would be the ‘Breast Buffer’ campaign which was initiated to create awareness against breast cancer.
ALT has also renovated a public school during the launch of the school drama 'Class of 2020, providing better infrastructure for the students. Recently, ALTBalaji associated with Impact Guru for a fundraising effort ‘One Meal at a Time’ for the distribution of food to the underprivileged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further enhancing the user experience, the OTT platform brought its most-acclaimed series Apharan to Alexa, enabling its users to listen to dialogues, the trailer and other exclusive content from this successful show. Fans of the show can enjoy and soak in the immersive and gripping experience provided by the suspense thriller, with just a simple voice command to their favorite Echo device.
Spanning a host of diverse genres, the year saw plenty of ALTBalaji shows garner rave reviews from audiences and critics alike. Mentalhood, the recently-launched drama on parenthood, went on to earn a resounding 8.9 rating on IMDb. On the other hand, Mission Over Mars (M-O-M), the inspirational tale of four women, raked in a rating of 8.6. ALTBalaji continued to keep the thriller-suspense and courtroom drama genre as exciting as Code M and The Verdict - State Vs. Nanavati received a rating of 8.3 and 8.6 respectively.
In this lockdown period, ALTBalaji has come to everyone’s rescue by entertaining audiences via their diverse bouquet of originals. Its soaring popularity has resulted in the ALTBalaji app, being one of the top three grossing apps in the OTT category, according to App Annie. With recent launches like 'Mentalhood', which featured a talented pool of actors like Karisma Kapoor, Dino Morea, Sandhya Mridul, Sanjay Suri, Shruti Seth, Shilpa Shukla, and Tillotama Shome, 'Who’s Your Daddy?' and 'XXX Uncensored Season 2', the platform has kept the entertainment quotient high. ALTBalaji will continue to do so with planning to launch almost 25-30 shows this year including 'Kehne Ko Humsafar Hai 3', 'Baarish 2', 'Bebaakee', 'Mumbhai', 'Apharan 2' and many more.
