iWorld
Hoichoi achieves a subscriber base of 13 million
KOLKATA: The leading Bengali OTT platform, Hoichoi, has completed three years in the industry with its grand launch in 2017. It has achieved a subscriber base of 13 million with 40 per cent of its revenue coming from international customers. It has also doubled its revenue in the past year.
With the vision of "entertaining people in their local language” and having over 60 Originals and 50 World Digital Premieres, Hoichoi has unveiled a fresh slate of 25 new Originals, two first day first show films and multiple world digital premieres for the upcoming year.
As a Hoichoi subscriber spends 50 minutes a day on the platform, the OTT player is always keen on bringing the best of technology for its customers. It has revealed a sneak peek into its new UI/UX (user interface/user experience) built which is seamless and easy to use for the customers.
A parental control feature will soon be added, which comes with Hoichoi being among the top 15 OTT platforms of India who have signed up for a unified self-regulation process with IAMAI for classification and demarcation of content available on all video-on-demand apps and websites in India.
Having customers over 100 countries including places like Japan, Sweden, Argentina, Iceland and more, Hoichoi has also announced Carrier Billing. It is an affordable way to consume content in the form of sache pricing and to buy a weekly or monthly subscription by paying with their mobile balance. This will be soon available for users in Bangladesh and Middle East. There’s also, subscription bundling, specifically for customers in India with JioFibre and Bangladesh with its top telecommunication network.
iWorld
Prashant Iyer joins Sony LIV as head of marketing
The former Netflix India director grew the streamer’s social following from half a million to 55m
MUMBAI: Sony LIV has poached one of India’s most battle-hardened streaming marketers. Prashant Iyer, who spent nearly eight years at Netflix building its India operation into a social-media juggernaut, has joined the platform as head of marketing.
Iyer leaves Netflix having done rather a lot. He grew the streamer’s India social community from roughly 500,000 followers to over 55m, delivered engagement and organic impressions double those of rivals, and ran more than 250 campaigns across titles, brand and partnerships. In his final role as director, marketing, he sat on the core leadership team credited with driving 15-times revenue and subscription growth over eight years. He also served as the only director-level social leader across Asia-Pacific, a regional mandate that stretched across a 200m-plus follower community.
Before Netflix came Nike, where Iyer spent three and a half years straddling digital brand commerce and key account management, including ownership of Myntra, the brand’s largest digital account in India. Earlier still, Titan Company gave him his first crack at brand and digital marketing.
Sony LIV, which has been muscling for position in an increasingly crowded streaming market, has landed a marketer who knows precisely how to build an audience from scratch and, just as importantly, how to keep it. For a platform still chasing the kind of cultural cachet Netflix India took years to earn, that is not a bad place to start.
