Hoichoi enters its fifth year of operations with 20 original shows

To increase its userbase further, the platform has launched a marketing campaign across Bengal with a special focus on out-of-home (OOH) medium.

Regional video streaming platform hoichoi plans to launch 20 new original shows this festive season, taking its original content library to 100 shows by the end of 2020. Focussing on delivering quality and quantity to its users, hoichoi claims to have doubled its investment in content acquisition. “While on OTT, festive season viewership does not really make that big a dent, we have seen our renewal rates go up during Durga Pujo. Furthermore, due to covid and our strong content slate, we now have multiple months which are translating into renewal months for us, Vishnu Mohta, co-founder, hoichoi, told BrandWagon Online.

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hoichoi claims to have seen two times growth in its overall watch-time and monthly active users and four times growth in viewership of content, not only in India but also in Bangladesh in the past one year. To increase its userbase further, the platform has launched a marketing campaign across Bengal with a special focus on out-of-home (OOH) medium. As per Mohta, the company’s offline campaigns are mostly about branding while the online is centered around content available on hoichoi and will be leveraging both mediums for their campaign. “On traditional platforms, we are investing heavily on OOH in Bengal as during Pujo people are out on the street, either visiting family or going to pandals. Furthermore, a lot of people come to Kolkata during this time and we want to leverage the rise in footfalls to communicate with a larger audience. Hence, we will put up a lot of banners and hoarding around Kolkata to bring forth our brand proposition,” he added.

Available globally, hoichoi reveals that while US, UK and Canada are platform’s big international markets simply because of the high penetration of OTT, this year Middle-East and Bangladesh have emerged as big focus markets for the hoichoi. “Due to our Bengali content, Bangladesh is a big market for us. And so has Middle-East simply because of Bengali and Bangladeshi migrant workers,” Mohta highlighted. The platform plans to produce seven-nine original shows in Bangladesh for the year 2022. As per the company, international market accounts for 40% of hoichoi’s direct subscription revenue.

With the rise in viewership comes the problems of payments. For Mohta, the Middle-East market as well as the Indian tier 2 and tier 3 markets have faced renewal issues as the viewers do not have credit/debit cards. To enhance the customer experience, hoichoi has partnered with telecom companies in the form of bundling offers in India and mobile top-up service in the Middle-East for customers to ease the renewal process. “Our focus is to go deep as well as go wide. For this, we have a team which is in talk with mobile top-ups centre across the country and are making subscription renewal possible from them. We also plan to introduce QR codes across TV, OOH and digital via which viewers can renew their subscriptions,” Mohta explained.

hoichoi has launched a freemium section this year with new shows released under this segment for audiences to watch for free without any ads. Till now, hoichoi has released two shows under this section in collaboration with jewellery brands namely Turu Love with Senco Gold and Diamonds and Subharambha with P.C. Chandra Jewellers.

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