Indian media conglomerate Zee Entertainment Enterprises (ZEE) entered into a 3-year multi-layered partnership with telecom major Bharti AirtelNSE -0.46 % within a week of removing all its content from Mukesh Ambani owned Reliance Jio after a disagreement over price.
As part of the strategic partnership, Airtel and Zee will work closely on creating exclusive video content for Airtel’s video-on-demand app Airtel TV and ZEE’s over-the-top (OTT) app ZEE5.
Also, over 50 million Airtel TV app users will get access to ZEE5 content including ZEE5 Originals, movies, TV shows, plays and more as the subscription cost will be bundled under Airtel TV’s plan.
“It’s a larger partnership and a win-win for both of us,” Punit Goenka MD, ZEE told ET. “Airtel brings a huge consumer base, which today, potentially, is not even exposed to the OTT world or even some of the new age youth audience which is not available to TV.”
Goenka stressed that ZEE has managed to get a very significant deal for app-in-app integration at the cost-per-download level compared to retail price, apart from good minimum guarantees on the Airtel TV piece for providing content.
Airtel will also share consumer insights and data of the users with ZEE as part of the deal. Goenka said that based on the demographic of Airtel TV consumers, ZEE will see which pieces of content are best fit for which platform.
For Goenka, consumer data was very critical from a long-term partnership and it was one of the key negotiation points for the deal. “It is very critical in today’s time because that’s the way we will understand our consumers’ behaviour and how they are reacting to the content. We are not just pure content suppliers. It’s a strategic alliance and therefore it has to be treated in that manner,” Goenka added.
Incidentally, none of this was part of the Reliance Jio deal, and Goenka thinks the company was not getting fair value for its content.
ET first reported on August 8 that ZEE has removed all its content from Reliance Jio, including 35 live TV channels and more than 2 lakh hours of video-on-demand content after failing to arrive at an agreement on price.
However, he maintained that withdrawing content from Jio and the deal with Airtel are not to be seen as connected.
“The Jio exit and Airtel deal are independent of each other. We have been in talks with Airtel for long,” Goenka said. “This doesn’t mean that we don’t want a deal with Jio. I would love to offer our content on Jio, provided we get a fair value. But going ahead, we will ask for consumer insights also to be part of the deal.”
On why consumer data is so important, Tarun Katial, CEO, ZEE5, said that it will allow the company to have full understanding of the consumer. “We will have their profile, their usage pattern etc which will help us in creating better content for them, better targeting and personalisation. We want to use content, data and technology as three pillars in this deal.”
Gopal Vittal, MD — India & South Asia at Bharti Airtel said that the partnership is a natural fit. “Exclusive content from ZEE brings that extra element of differentiation to our digital play while providing this content better discoverability across our large user base.”
Source: Economic Times