With the world of web series exciting almost every nook and corner of the world, even the popular youth entertainment channel MTV couldn’t stay spared from the trend. It has been learnt that this young entertainer is working on creating a web series that will supplement its TV content. This appears as a TV+ strategy to capture its target audience from every platform.
This move of MTV was taken as they noticed a dip in their subscriber numbers post TRAI’s tariff order. While MTV mentioned that the move hasn’t put any impact on its advertising revenues but, the drop in subscriber numbers still remains a hard reality.
MTV, a part of the Viacom 18 group is soon going to release its own set of web series on Viacom’s OTT platform Voot. Currently, MTV’s entire content also streams on Voot in a catch-up TV format.
Ferzad Palia, Head – Youth, Music and English Entertainment, Viacom18, spoke about the same on a business news platform, “The non-linear format allows us to create a lot more content for the viewers of a show. Besides what we have on television, there’s behind-the-scenes content that we are able to do. We are also working on creating original series on Voot, which would be exclusively online. Currently, we are getting to know the audience better in the digital space. But you could see something within three-six months.”
Voot has already been of great help for MTV in reaching out its larger set of audience, which couldn’t spend much time on MTV because of a single TV household.
Palia further added, “We are not losing out to anyone but gaining on every front. While TV is growing, so is our digital platform Voot. As a brand, we’ve given the youth a place to consume content. OTTs have increased our reach to much smaller markets than we thought of. Personalised consumption is on the rise.”
“Channels like us are bought very differently. For us its always been about youth-centric brands. We do a lot of customisation around branded content space. Seeing good growth there along with sponsorship — there’s a lot of integration we do with brands. Branded content is growing faster than regular advertising albeit on a smaller base,” Palia further said.
MTV expects that after the web series launch, their watch time will cross 5 billion minutes in the second half of the year.
