It was only a matter of time before TikTok’s stardom in India hits a dead-end. And a dead-end it is soon about to meet. Infact, ByteDance owned – TikTok, Facebook owned Instagram and of course, YouTube, all are about to come under fire of a new video content app by Zee5, called Hypershots.
Zee5 is fast emerging as one of India’s, and potentially the world’s leading OTT platforms. After the success of platforms like Hotstar, Netflix and Amazon Prime in the Indian market, Zee5 is now experimenting its likability in the market as well, and going by the looks of it, they are being well-received by the Indian audience. “We don’t want users to come to us only for long-form and go somewhere else for short-form. The digital ecosystem will make users come back more and more and their habit formation with ZEE5 will happen,” Tarun Katial, chief executive officer (CEO) of ZEE5 India told Business Today.
Hypershots will have ad-supported content, but the intent is to become a subscription service in the long run, The app will reportedly facilitate creation of 90-second user-generated content, created by celebrities and regular users. The intention behind the new Hypershots app would be to drive engagement and increase the number of users.
TikTok, which was launched in 2017 by Beijing-based ByteDance for out-of-China consumers, has just last year dethroned Facebook to become the app with the most downloads worldwide, at a staggering figure of 1.5 billion. India has been a major contributor to this figure, and 44% of all downloads have been from India. As such, India is TikTok’s largest market, which further explains the availability of all major Indian languages on the platform. TikTok is a big hit among the urban and semi-urban regions of India.
Zee5, meanwhile, is India’s largest original digital content producing platform by a long shot, and now, it is aiming to be the biggest player in India’s digital content industry. Reportedly, over a period of one year, there has been an increase of 100% in tech investment by Zee5. The OTT platform is planning to launch over 15 to 20 original films this year, and has over 100 original shows decked up for the same period.
While all this would be on the OTT platform, their short video content app slated for launch later this year is bound to hurt the interests of Tik Tok. Needless to say, Zee5 will ensure that their product – ‘Hypershots’ is better than Tik Tok on all counts, from features offered to user interface. But it all boils down to whether the Indian audience open its arms to the app like it did for Tik Tok. That will be known only later this year.