OTTs follow TV playbook, offer shows in staggered format

To boost audience stickiness and engagement, over-the-top (OTT) services are now experimenting with bringing audiences to their platforms on a daily basis with long-running shows by adopting the television-style daily soap operas.

- ROSHNI SHEKHAR

The move comes as the OTT platforms release all the episodes of their original series at once and the audience consumes it in a single sitting. To increase audience engagement, some of the platforms have now started weekly releases of select episodes of a series.

“One of the objectives that we have for JioHotstar is to ensure that we have more and more engagement and how do we get consumers to come to us on a daily basis than (again) come and watch us just on a weekend,” said Kevin Vaz, chief executive officer (CEO), entertainment, JioStar, in the company’s recent earnings call.

He added that in Tamil Nadu, JioHotstar had launched Heartbeat, which was one of its top-rated shows, consisting of 100 episodes, with daily release of episodes.

“We saw consumers coming to this platform for 100 days on a daily basis, and for us, that is something that we like to also pivot with to make sure that we have stickiness on this platform,” he said, adding that the company plans to replicate similar shows across other markets.