We're onboarding new consumers through entertaining content: Flipkart

Last year, the home-grown e-commerce platform, Flipkart—acquired by Walmart in 2018—made a foray into the video streaming space.

The platform, apart from the shopping, now enables its customers to access a library of entertainment content that includes short-format series, movies and more. It launched an original chat show, Backbenchers towards the end of 2019. Now, it’s coming out with an anthology of shorts—Zindagi In Short—that has seven short films produced by Guneet Monga of Sikhya Entertainment.

Prakash Sikaria, Vice-President of Growth and Monetisation at Flipkart, talks about Flipkart’s entry into an unknown space, the challenges of navigating it, why it’s not a step to compete with Amazon and the plans to grow it further. Edited excerpt:

It’s been a couple of months that Flipkart got into video streaming. What’s the experience so far been like?

We launched the basic platform somewhere around August, 2019. And, ours is a mobile only, free-to-all platform with a vision that we want to democratise good content for everyone. The first phase was getting content that is available from all the other players—Eros, TVF, Viacom. We aggregated the content and put on the platform. Now, we are getting into the second phase where we want short-form content, followed by interactive content. It has been an interesting journey; we are learning and evolving.

But Flipkart hasn’t been into the content space primarily. You are not even in Mumbai, the hub of entertainment. Wasn’t it a very new and hence challenging space to navigate?

The first step was to put the technology together, which we thought and continue to believe that we are very good at fundamentally; perhaps, better than a lot of content players. The second phase where we are getting into co-creation of content, which I would say, is very new. Most of our team come fresh from more consumer-thinking kind of a background and not a content background. But that I think is good because we have a fresh perspective on how we are looking at things. There is a steep learning curve for all of us.

What was the trigger to do this? Was it just that Amazon as an e-commerce platform has Prime Video, or does it go beyond that?

You know when Flipkart and Amazon are discussed, they are usually discussed in the same bracket. But we have very different strategies. If you see how Flipkart is looking at content, you would realise that we are looking at it how various other free platforms look at it. If you see, after WhatsApp or any other social media, the most penetrated or most widely used online form is content, primarily driven by low data prices and India’s fascination around Bollywood. We thought we are consumer internet company, we need to have a plan. That’s where it started. But our strategy is different because success for us would 100-200 million people watching content on our platform. The idea is to have anyone who wants to have a content of interest should have that on Flipkart Video Originals.

How has the response so far been since you already have enough content?

Very encouraging. We now see a large percentage of customers already watching Flipkart Video Originals and engaging with the platform, and that was the core hypothesis. It has been going as per plan.

It’s been almost four years to the digital boom in the content space. There are too many established platforms with deep pockets and deep understanding of the entertainment world. How do you make a space for yourself in the clutter?

What everyone on the content side of the world has done is that they have taken a very TV or a desktop oriented approach to content. But 80 per cent of the content is watched on mobile devices. I don’t think that any platform is making content for mobile. Any immersive content that you see on platforms that you are talking about is better suited either on TV or larger screen. When we started looking at this from our lenses, we said that mobile is more an India or China phenomena. If you look at the United States, more than 50 per cent of the content is watched on smart TVs. In India, we can’t even afford smart TVs and hence this. If you look at Zindagi In Shorts, it is about 15-minutes byte sized content and powerful storytelling. That is why we have brought Guneet (Monga) on board. It is driven by the thought: what will the content created just for mobile look like. Some of the pieces that emerges – short-form, interactive – that will be our play, which as you see it unfold will be extremely different from the content being built for the larger screen.

What was the kind of work you did before getting into this space? Did you study the consumer pattern?

We commissioned a detailed market study across the key markets. Few of the insights were that the tier II, tier III markets are highly under served. Those markets don’t have the paying capacity for audio-video platforms. While all the good content is behind a pay wall, these people are under served. The second insight was that the only device they are watching content is on mobile and they are not getting the kind of content suited for mobile screens. We merged these insights.

Was Zindagi In Shorts just outsourced to Guneet, or Flipkart was involved in the creative process?

We are deeply involved in the process of curation. What our job as a platform, especially when we are very data-centred, is to understand the consumption pattern of people and influence the curation and aggregation partners to form that kind of content. That was our deal, even as we gave Guneet a lot of freedom to create the content. The genre or the storytelling was assessed by her.

How are you choosing the people that you collaborate with?

It goes back to our core ethos that we want to be a mobile-centric platform. When you look at short films, there are not many creators to have created impactful shorts. The choice of Guneet was obvious because of her success in creating phenomenal short films. That is where the conversation with her started. Our choices, even in future, will be eclectic like that. We are not going after the typical web-series that is being made, our choice of creators will also align with what a mobile centric world will look like.

Do you have collaborations in place already on what we see next?

Yes, we have. Post this, as I mentioned that we want to focus on short-form and interactive content. We have a lot of non-fiction content, which is kind of in the reality show space. There is a lot in the pipeline that we can’t talk about now.

Something along the lines of the Backbenchers that you did with Farah Khan…

Yes. That was our first non-fiction show. But we want to bring far more interactivity and creativity. You will see that unfold over the next 30 to 60 days. A lot more announcements are going to come from us. Those are the choices that most of the platforms are not making. Those are the choices that we have chosen to make to stand out. Mobile-first and interactive are the key focus for us. The role that our content plays is very different from the others in the market because we are on-boarding new consumers into the e-commerce world as well.

Is there a budget allocation you are looking at for the video vertical?

The objective of content for us is to engage masses for them to come over and over to the platform and engage with content more, or engage with the platform more. That is the success metric – what percentage of our customer is spending what amount of time. We are still in early days to have a concrete view on what the budget is. It’s an evolving thing. But the idea is – can we put out something new and fresh everyday for our customers. That’s the motto driving us.

I watched the seven shorts in the anthology and felt that a female-centric theme binds them. Vijayeta Kumar, the director of Sunny Side Upar, also had an all-women crew. Did you want to make a statement of sorts with such choices?

From that perspective, these are creative choices that we really encourage. I believe that what we were trying to achieve is the diversity. Every director, every creator comes with their won kind of nuances, their own kind of vision, both around the team and around the content and we let them flourish. It was heartening to see the kind of interest shown. The output his commensurate to the choices made. If you see, there’s this female thread and there’s another thread that every short film in the anthology is for a different age group. The stories just came that way by design and not planning. There’s a lot of interpretation that’s happening as we talk to people who have watched the shorts. A lot of these key takeaways are creating conversation, and that’s something we wanted.