iWorld
Real Image empowers Mathrubhumi’s digital expansion with Wildmoka
Mumbai: One year after integrating Backlight’s Wildmoka platform into their digital workflow, Mathrubhumi has effectively more than doubled its digital footprint. Real Image, a leading media solutions provider, played a pivotal role in helping Mathrubhumi embrace a digital-first strategy.
The impact of Wildmoka on Mathrubhumi’s digital presence was evident within weeks of its adoption in 2022. Mathrubhumi digital business – director Mayura M S remarked, “As we celebrated our centenary, we sought solutions to expand our digital reach without significantly increasing our operational costs. After a comprehensive evaluation of available options, the cloud-based Wildmoka platform emerged as the natural choice. Over the past year, Wildmoka has not only boosted our digital rankings but has also fuelled non-linear growth in viewership, all the while significantly enhancing productivity. Real Image’s enthusiastic involvement added to our overall satisfaction.”
Wildmoka empowers broadcasters and rights owners to produce and deliver content from any source, to any destination, in any format, at speed and at scale. The solution simplifies most operations with a ‘Single Click,’ making publishing workflows intuitive and efficient. This includes automating tasks like adding overlays such as logos and watermarks, pre-post rolls, thumbnail decoration, selecting destinations with pre-filled metadata and outputting content in the relevant aspect ratio.
Mathrubhumi social media head Joseph Kumpail highlighted, “In addition to enabling rapid publishing, enhanced live streaming and efficient editing, Wildmoka helped us manage the churn through its quick onboarding, reducing the learning curve for our social media teams. Using Wildmoka, our story publishing time has decreased by two-thirds, resulting in a remarkable 120% increase in viewership.”
Real Image product management head S. Shankar Bhat noted, “Through Wildmoka, Real Image has empowered several prominent broadcasters to adopt a digital-first workflow, facilitating swift and efficient content dissemination across all digital platforms. We are delighted to witness Mathrubhumi achieving its desired results and experiencing a substantial return on investment as our partner.”
In an ever-evolving digital content creation and consumption landscape, innovative digital solution providers must adapt swiftly to industry trends and set new standards.
Backlight director – channel sales Jakob Hummes shared, “The Backlight team engages in continuous dialogue with customers and closely monitors industry developments. We are committed to pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved with our Wildmoka product line. Post-IBC, we have introduced exciting enhancements, particularly including our live stream production capabilities.”
iWorld
Arafta Season 2 greenlit as YouTube hit crosses 850 million views
GoQuest, Rains double down on global Turkish drama success story
MUMBAI: GoQuest Media and Rains Pictures have greenlit Season 2 of Arafta, riding on the runaway success of its debut season that has clocked over 850 million views on YouTube and secured licensing deals across 19 territories.
The upcoming season, already in production, will span 100 episodes and continue with a YouTube-first release strategy, a model that has proved to be a quiet disruptor in global content distribution. Season 1, which premiered in November 2025, built a strong digital following before translating that traction into international deals.
The series is currently licensed to platforms including Amazon MX Player in India, Kanal 7 in Turkey, and Vidio, along with several markets across Europe such as Romania, Hungary and Latvia. Across five language channels, the show has amassed more than 2.5 million subscribers, signalling growing global appetite for Turkish storytelling.
Notably, many of these licensing deals were struck after the show had already aired on YouTube, flipping the traditional distribution model on its head. Instead of competing with broadcasters, the digital-first strategy appears to be doing the heavy lifting in building awareness and audience demand.
GoQuest Media managing director Vivek Lath said, “Arafta is proving out what we believed about the make-to-sell model. A YouTube-first release does not compete with licensing. It builds the asset that licensees are buying.”
Season 1 wrapped on April 17 with a globally streamed finale that drew over 102,000 concurrent viewers, setting the stage for the next chapter. Lead actors İlsu Demirci and Emin Günenç will return, with the narrative continuing to explore themes of love, vengeance, sacrifice and fate.
Rains Pictures executive Sevda Kaygısız said the decision to move quickly into Season 2 was driven not just by success, but by the depth of the story still to be told. “Arafta is not just a successful project for us; it reflects our belief in powerful storytelling and building a genuine emotional connection with audiences,” she noted.
As Turkish dramas continue to travel beyond borders, Arafta’s success underscores a larger shift in how global hits are made and sold. In this case, the small screen found its big moment online first, and the world followed.
