We are Already Home to Over Six Million Unique Content Creators: Abhishek Joshi, MX Player

by  Mugdha Gaonkar Marketing | December 3, 2020 | Interview

MX Player MX TakaTak Abhishek Joshi Badshah MX TakaTak Fame House

OTT platform MX Player is the No. 1 breakout video streaming app in the country, as per the State of Mobile, 2020 report by App Annie, the industry standard in-app analytics and app market data provider. The platform has close to 220 million monthly average users, and focuses on exclusive original content. Its emphasis is on high quality content in Hindi and regional languages, including Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi, Bhojpuri and Kannada. After the ban of Chinese video-sharing app TikTok in India during the COVID-19 crisis, MX Player came out with its own short video platform MX TakaTak and also got into the high engagement gaming segment with the launch of a gaming platform under the MX banner just before lockdown.

In an exclusive interview with EVENTFAQS Media, Abhishek Joshi, Head of Marketing and Business Partnerships, MX Player, shares insights on the brand reach of MX Player, its USP, launch of TakaTak, future plans and more.

Tell us how brands are utilising the reach of MX Player. Does providing free content, gaming and music options for subscribers help in attracting advertisers?

MX Player has fast grown into an entertainment super app on the back of our vast range of OTT offerings - games, audio music and video playback. We operate on an advertising-based video on demand (AVOD) model with an unparalleled scale of distribution, which has helped us not only in terms of attracting viewers, but also advertisers and brands, leading to a phenomenal rate of growth.

Unlike our competitors, our core proposition is to provide premium entertainment across categories, formats and languages with narratives that are massy, can appeal to the youth and make for a fresh change as compared to the content found on traditional media. This has made MX emerge as the preferred platform of choice for not only the consumer but also the advertiser, who can engage with our wide range of offerings.

In fact, we recently launched the ‘Everytainment’ package, where we are able to offer brands integrated solutions across all our verticals that reaches a monthly active user base of over 200 million in India. There is no better way to reach the vast Indian mass market.

MX Player had launched an app 'TakaTak' as an alternative to TikTok in India just after the Chinese app was banned. How has the response been and how do you plan to monetize it?

We are already home to over six million unique content creators and have received great feedback from our users. Some of the biggest names in the influencer community, including star rapper Badshah, are a part of the MX TakaTak family. We want to raise the bar for mobile-first content creation within the app, opening a new world of endless possibilities for every type of content creator in the country.

Our daily video views grew from 0 to 1 billion+ just within a month of our launch and we are expecting massive growth on it in the time to come.

We’ve recently begun scaling monetisation for MX TakaTak and offer ad assets like infeed video, app open and top view. We also offer brands high engagement through content hosting, hashtag challenges and the opportunity to work with our large community of influencers to co-create impactful video content.

There are so many OTT players in the market today, offering good content. What is your USP over other platforms?

Our strength lies in creating and delivering original, fresh content, backed by powerful story-telling as well as our technology, which is built from the ground up for Indian consumers – be it ensuring how their viewing experience is not marred by low Internet speeds and poor connectivity, allowing a feature to download video content, optimizing performance even when there’s a fluctuating network and the ability to share video content.

Within two years of launch, we have successfully managed to emerge as the leading product in all the categories we operate in - OTT, Music, Short Video, Gaming and Local Playback. The fact that we so seamlessly integrate all forms of entertainment on one common platform drives consumers to pick us as their platform of choice.

What are the initiatives or activations you have planned for the near future through MX Player?

We have just launched Chapter 2 of one of our biggest shows Aashram, directed by Prakash Jha, and have seen great traction on that. Part 1 has clocked over 450 million streams till date and Chapter 2 has seen 500% higher streams on Day 1 compared to its first edition. A robust 360-degree marketing plan with OOH, digital, radio and print propelled the series towards achieving such great numbers.

On the content front, we’ve experimented with genres like crime, thrillers, office dramas and relationship dramas – all of which have yielded results. We’ve launched over 30 shows from March, 2020 until now and going forward, we have many other interesting concepts in the pipeline as well.

On MX TakaTak, we recently launched the first edition of MX TakaTak Fame House, a one-of-its-kind experience wherein 18 leading Indian influencers were put under one roof in Goa and given an invite-only opportunity to reach millions of new fans daily. We gave them all the professional guidance and tools to turn their ideas into reality and all they had to do was create, collaborate and chill. We are looking at more such innovations consecutively.