The world’s largest streamer of South Asian content – ZEE5 officially launched in the USA, a few hours ago. The launch was broadcasted on multiple social media platforms including on their official YouTube and Twitter pages. ZEE5 Global’s Chief Business Officer, Archana Anand hosted the event while International Superstar Priyanka Chopra Jonas was the Chief Guest during the launch. The launch of this OTT platform couldn’t have happened at a better time for ZEE5, especially as more and more Indian content is starting to catch the attention of International audiences.
Well, let’s expand on that previous statement. Currently, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ Hotstar are producing and releasing a lot of Indian content (both Bollywood and regional) for India. In fact, these three OTT platforms are spending more money for Indian content than the rest of the Indian regional OTT market combined – which just shows the value for Indian content in the OTT market. Now many may argue that this content will be targeted mainly at the audience from the Indian subcontinent, some neighboring countries as well as in the Middle-East. These International OTT giants will probably not show any of their Indian content to other countries such as the UK, European countries, the US, etc.
And for the most part, that argument is actually correct. Netflix, Amazon, and Disney will release regional content in the aforementioned regions so as to attract local subscribers. With their immense libraries filled with brilliant content, chances of Indian content being released outside of the Asian Pacific are quite slim. But ZEE5 has had a breakthrough with its targeting of the Indian diaspora audience around the globe. Due to this, ZEE5 managed to be the number 1 streaming service to provide South Asian content in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh and has a strong and ever growing presence in the Asian Pacific, Middle East, and North African regions as well as in the UK and the rest of Europe. ZEE5 is also the first streaming platform to make Bangladeshi content available for the International audience.
By targeting the Indian diaspora audience, ZEE5 managed to get a fan base that represents home and the streaming platform worked its way up from there. Now, with a strong presence in the Global market, the Indian International OTT platform has slowly started to attract audiences in said region. And just, at the right time. With Telugu, Tamil, Kannada as well as Bollywood film industries improving their body of work for better content due to the demand among the Indian audience, ZEE5 too is releasing multiple new original movies and TV shows in the aforementioned languages and more.
We can expect a fierce “battle” to take place between the USA’s latest OTT platform as it takes on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video among others, in the South Asian content market. Check out the launch down below:
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