Digital video has been growing at a phenomenal scale in India in the last four years. Accelerated smartphone adoption coupled with the democratisation of data, gave this a much-needed impetus. This steady rise has been led by mobile video consumption, propelled by homegrown social media and short video platforms like ShareChat and Moj. 

In an exclusive chat with Ankush Sachdeva, CEO & Co-founder, ShareChat & Moj, he touches on the various facets of today’s digital video ecosystem that are leading to dynamic shifts in the system.

Excepts:

On User Behavior Post-Pandemic

Online video consumption has been on a steady rise with per user time spent on video witnessing an incremental growth during the lockdown. This was led by casual consumption of short video content by users via multiple sessions in their free time. 

Amidst the lockdown, the restriction on movement tilted users’ interest towards UGC. The inclination towards UGC began during the lockdown and has sustained post it as well. The massive demand for videos led to the formation of a creator economy in India. Therefore, more and more users are now pursuing content creation as a profession. 

On Investment Plans

Catering to the growing demand for digital video, we are doubling down on video content, both in the long and short formats and investing significantly in our short video app, Moj.

We are constantly innovating our creator tools and making them more powerful with AR technology. Moj was the first Indian short-video platform to bring Snap’s innovative Camera Kit technology to India. The camera kit is an end-to-end solution to include Snap’s AR lenses into the app, with innovative lenses being added on the platform regularly.

Both our products, ShareChat and Moj, are powered by cutting edge AI and ML technology that understands our community’s consumption pattern and serves them a highly personalised feed based on their interests. Our aim is to serve the best social experience to our community on both our platforms. 

We are building live streaming capabilities on Moj and it will be a major focus area for us in the next few quarters. This will be an immensely effective way to monetise for creators, with their followers and fans sending them virtual gifts during live streaming sessions. We believe this would not only help our creators monetise, but also, help them to interact with our user community across the country with more relevant and engaging content. 

On ShareChat, our beta experiments with long-form video SCTV have been immensely successful. We will be scaling it up to all our users next year. We are building an ecosystem of publishers and creators around long-form videos, allowing revenue sharing to enable our partners to monetise their investments in long-form video.

On The Sector's Potential 

Digital video is a booming sector with lots of potentials. With an increase in the number of users and time spent, the opportunities are endless.

The short video space offers huge potential in terms of advertising and branding for businesses. With an increase in the adoption of digital advertising by SMEs, more revenues will be generated through short video platforms. Nowadays, users' consumption preference is moving beyond entertainment and comedy to more niche categories such as learning, upskilling, fitness and other long-tail content categories, opening up more avenues for the creator economy. 

Growth in the digital video sector also comes with a few challenges, need for powerful AI and recommendation engine to serve the right content to the right audience; serving, storing and managing digital video content on cloud is expensive and a lot of smaller organisations can’t sustain without a consistent cash flow and most importantly the talent pool needed to make digital video investment successful is hard to come by in India. 

We are growing our focus on artificial intelligence extensively and hiring not only in India, but onboarding talent in the UK, US and other geographies. 

On Popular Genres

Entertainment categories like acting, dance & comedy have seen continued engagement over the years, as the users are looking for fun, lighthearted content to spend their time on. Romance and heartbreak as a sub-category have seen a massive uptick in engagement, mostly driven by the need of young internet users.

Lifestyle categories like food, health & fitness, beauty & fashion &, home decor have become more popular as now there is more content available in regional languages and partly attributed to lockdowns in the pandemic, with people spending more time in their homes.  We are also seeing increased interest in categories like automobiles, gadgets and technology along with mobile gaming content, again driven by massive interest from the next generation of young internet users. 

We are continuously powering our platforms ShareChat and Moj with more niche content. And for this objective, we are diversifying our content platter with more long-tail content. We have identified many engaging categories within the short video space and are supporting creators who are leaders in those categories.