One app to download, one log-in and a single password to remember. In a vast country like the US with 250-plus mainstream and about 30 south Asian streaming platforms, Zee5 Global, the international arm of Zee5, has emerged as a leading player in its space. And now they are giving customers outside India more reasons to come on board by giving them options in regional language content by adding on and paying for only what they want to view.

“We are almost 15 times ahead of our nearest competition in the US, with 57 per cent market share and 240,000 active users. Many players have tried before us but have failed to make the kind of mark we have,” said Archana Anand, chief business officer, Zee5 Global.

The South Asian market, she pointed out, was a niche market, comprising barely two to three per cent of the population. They are difficult to find. You find them scattered across the Tri-state area, the Bay area, Texas… But we were extremely effective on the back of some strategic steps we took to acquire customers.
One of the customer bases they identified was the students. “We tied up with the North American Association of Indian Students and took a Bollywood dance competition to 150 universities. You have to see the video to believe how exciting it was for the Indian diaspora students. They travel to the US on a shoestring budget and miss local content and news. So we gave them the Zee5 subscription at a subsidised rate. That was lapped up by them,” she said.

Another strategic move by the channel was to tie up with Patel Brothers, one of the largest format grocery stores for south Asians. “Their customers are the most likely to consume our content. We had Sonali Bendre fly down and put the Zee5 logo on every shopping cart. It was a huge success. Links were also forged with Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati associations, all strong cohorts and deeply desi at heart,” Anand said.

A cheeky move was to ride on the streaming of RRR. “Netflix had the Hindi version of the film. So for every promo they had, saying RRR on Netflix in Hindi, we added: ‘But original on Zee5.’ These days people want to watch the original version, irrespective of the language, as subtitles are already there. We heard of young people forming watch parties at home for the film, also calling their American friends to watch with them just as they see Marvel superhero movies together. Our ambition is to lead the charge of south Asian content doing a crossover,” Anand said.

While the US is the biggest market for the platform, other key segments include Central Asia, Australia, Canada, the UK and Singapore and they lead in most of these markets too, Anand claimed.

Marketing moves in these regions have been specific to local needs. “Central Asia has the largest volume of blue-collar workers coming from India, especially Kerala. We studied their needs and screened movies at the labour camps in the weekends, with popcorn. They have very little disposable income as they save every penny for their trip back home. We ran a contest with a ticket to India as the prize. That really worked. They shared subscriptions to watch content. We also tied up with Lulu, the biggest format store for south Asians in the Middle East. We do big activities on New Year, Onam and Diwali, flying over stars like Sonali Bendre, Dia Mirza and Aditi Rao Hydari. Bollywood has massive appeal there, with even Emiratis watching our films,” she said.

A solution to end piracy

The latest move from Zee5 Global has come from an ambition to become the single destination for south Asians from being the leading destination. “So many south Asian streaming platforms, we realised, were struggling. The intensity and finances needed to market them are not easy to gather. So we invited these platforms to sit with us and get access to the huge reach that we had garnered. The original dream of these platforms was content creation and the platforms were created only as a means of distribution for that content. So now they get that reach without any cost to them on distribution, technology or marketing. Everybody understood the merit of the partnership,” said Anand.

The platform recently announced its first six such regional content partners at a programme in Mumbai. “Two of them are happy to sit only within us and do away with their direct-to-consumer play option altogether,” she said.

The six add-on options are Simply South (for all south Indian languages), Oho Gujarati (Gujarati), Chaupal (Punjabi, Bhojpuri and Haryanvi), NammaFlix (Kannada), iStream (Malayalam) and Epic On (Hindi).

Each of these platforms can be added to the Zee5 Global subscription for $1.49 a month. “For us, this will guarantee greater stickiness and engagement, and less churn, which is one of the biggest problems in our industry,” Anand explained.
The platform has even launched a US referral system for its Indian subscribers. “Everyone knows someone in the US, be it a friend, a colleague or a relation. All one has to do is share their unique referral link with them,” she said. Every successful referral will be awarded Rs 500. “And there is no cap on the number. So 10 successful US referrals would win one Rs 5,000.”

This aggregation, she says, is a solution to end the piracy problem, against which a campaign was also launched. “Film piracy impacts us as a group. When we ask those who go for IPTV pirated boxes in any global market, they offer two reasons — getting all the content in a single destination and the reduced price. With the launch of Zee5 add-ons, an aggregation solution, we are offering all the content together at the most competitive pricing.” This, she pointed out, was the right time to flag off the anti-piracy campaign. “Now that we can offer a legitimate aggregator as an option, the campaign will not sound like preaching,” she offered.

Zee5 Global is positioned as a subscription-based model and will never be an ad-supported free one. Explaining the choice, she said the south Asian cohort in the US was an affluent one, with the average income being $123,000, almost thrice that of the average American. “So it makes perfect sense for us to take this premium ad-free route.”

Asked about the possibility of the aggregation of Bengali streaming content, she said the strategy regarding the choice of languages to add on content in had been dictated by the “lowest lying fruit”. “In the US, the biggest cohorts are Gujarati and the south Indian population. That’s why we went after them first. We will be happy to go after the others in future as well,” she summed up.