Mumbai: Media insights firm Ormax Media has upgraded its content testing tool for the OTT/streaming category, Ormax Stream Track. The tool, which has been used to test 214 web-series, direct-to-OTT films, and OTT reality shows since 2016, will now have the capability of testing shows in documentary formats too.
14 Indian documentaries have released on major streaming platforms in India since the start of 2022. Additionally, several international documentaries are beginning to find traction in India, suggesting that the documentary genre is acquiring higher interest in the Indian market.
The upgrade identifies nine key drivers of content engagement for documentaries, among Indian audiences, namely knowledge, credibility, authentic treatment, theme relevance, theme uniqueness, suspenseful narrative, surprise & amazement, emotional heft, and inspiration. Like all content testing done by Ormax Media in streaming, theatrical and television domains, the company reports Ormax Power Rating (OPR), a number on the 0-100 scale, that is a strong predictor of the likely audience engagement when the property being tested is eventually released. Ormax Media’s testing tools Ormax Stream Test, Ormax Moviescope, Ormax First Draft & Ormax True Value use an analytics tool that assigns weightages to different drivers, and fuses primary research data collected from the audience with these weightages, to calculate the OPR.
Speaking about the need for the upgrade, Ormax Media head - business development (streaming, TV & brands) Keerat Grewal said, “We are constantly looking at opportunities to upgrade our tools to align them to market needs. Given the growing interest in documentaries in India since the pandemic, we estimate more audience demand for this format in the coming years in the Indian market. Through our analysis and testing using the newly-identified drivers, we want to guide platforms in taking prudent content and marketing decisions in the documentary genre.”
Speaking about Ormax Media’s content testing work, Ormax Media head - content & campaign testing Mitesh Thakkar said, “Over the last 15 years, we have tested 925 properties across streaming, theatrical and television, at script or video stages. The Indian audience are constantly evolving, especially in the post-pandemic world, as are their expectations from new content being released. Content testing is an audience-first approach, that enables platforms, studios, channels, and producers to incorporate audience inputs, in their pursuit to deliver an engaging and profitable piece of content. With this upgrade in the documentary genre, we now have the ability to test content in fiction series (limited & unlimited), films, non-fiction (reality shows), non-fiction (documentaries), and animations genres.”
