MUMBAI: Sony Yay recently turned two and claimed to have grown twofold in both viewership as well as market share. The channel now has plans to add regional feeds.

“As we already have seven languages in our bouquet, we have plans to add more in the near future,” said Sony Yay programming head Ronojoy Chakraborty. Not only this, but the channel’s plan is to also curate content primarily for the digital platforms. “We are planning a lot of content for digital platforms. We are planning short forms, shows and spinoffs of the characters that we already have. We are building our content that is only meant for digital,” he added.

Some in the industry have urged creators to look at the pre-school kids space but Sony Yay feels that monetisation and viewership are challenges to overcome since BARC does not provide viewership cuts for the age group of 0-2 years. Chakraborty revealed that the channel also has plans to create some series for pre-school audiences, but it is at a nascent stage right now.

Sony Yay claimed that last year the channel garnered 28 GRPs and today, it has increased to 48 GRPs. The channel is banking on 13 new movies to woo kids by giving them a 20 per cent share in FPC. There won’t be any new show launches this year. Instead, it will build on existing characters and shows. “The more content you have, the more viewership you will get. Although kids like repeats but too much of it gets boring, so every channel tends to build a library of content,” he said.

When asked about the key trends in 2019, he said that there will be an exploration of the kids genre in the digital space. On TV, kids are going to watch a lot of animation and the longer duration content like telemovies is still working better. “Character affinity is growing day by day and most of the programming is character driven. We see a lot of growth in consumer product and merchandising business in the forthcoming year and we will see exploration in digital,” he concluded.