KOLKATA: While ZeeL MD & CEO Punit Goenka revealed his strategic vision for Zee 4.0 last year, it was evident that digital would take up a big space in the new era. Matching expectations, the digital arm Zee5 is gradually improving its performance to emerge as a leading OTT player in India. But Goenka does not intend to limit its leadership to the domestic market, and plans to strengthen its position among the South Asian diaspora audience, for which the company has been ramping up multilingual content across the platform, as he shared in the Q3 earnings call.

While Zee5 had 54.7 global million monthly active users (MAU), and 5.2 million global daily active users (DAU) in the September 2020 quarter, the MAUs and DAUs stood at 65.9 million and 5.4 million respectively in December 2020. Genka shared that the lack of TV content during Q1 impacted the conversion of active users as a large part of the “funnel” to add users was TV catchup content.

The company will not invest any capital in MAU-DAU conversion and it is going to be largely based on the catch-up TV portfolio. Zee5 will target 15-18 per cent conversion of MAU to DAU in the next fiscal.

The video streaming service released 18 original shows and two movies during the quarter. However, the average watch time per user per month was 152 minutes in Q2 has slid to 133 minutes in the third quarter. While an investor pointed out that the engagement is lagging compared to other platforms with similar content, Goenka said that the low performance of some linear TV shows of the network has impacted the catch-up TV consumption, leading to lower engagement.

Zee5 revenues were at 117.8 crore, up 19 per cent quarter-on-quarter, while EBITDA loss was at Rs 175.7 crore versus Rs 189.4 crore in Q2. The EBITDA losses continue due to higher investment in content.