by Thinus Ferreira
Vodacom's Video Play has just added PrideTV content with a carousel of gay content for South African viewers, while the streaming service's boss says viewers have been flocking to Video Play since it decided to add the American soap The Bold and the Beautiful which is "blowing the lights out".
Video Play that competes with other available subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services like Netflix South Africa, MultiChoice's Showmax, Amazon Prime Video and others, now features a carousel of LGBTQ content ranging from dramas, comedies and documentaries to films as a newly-added subscription sub-section.
Access to PrideTV, where users can watch anything from "comedies, sexy college boy thrillers, horrors, love stories, gripping dramas and doccies about LGBT issues and personalities" cost R5 a day to subscribe to, R15 weekly, or R25 for monthly access.
TVwithThinus spoke with Zubair Munshi, Vodacom video commercial operations executive head, about the addition of PrideTV and the plan behind it, Vodacom's plans to add more linear TV channels and a set-top box (STB) in future, how The Bold and the Beautiful is doing and what the impact of Eskom's loadshedding is on its video streaming offering.
Why was PriveTV added to Vodacom Video Play? Can you give some insight into the decision to add LGBTQ content?
Zubair: So, as you know, Vodacom is a company that prides itself on connecting customers for a better future and part of that is that we try to include everyone and that's what gave impetus to the inclusion of PrideTV.
If you look at Video Play, we have a lot of content, movies, series, content from West Africa, we have some Bollywood content, we have a very nice kids schedule - we've brought in other partners like Da Vinci Kids and Hopster - and PrideTV is very topical. As part of our all-inclusive strategy we opted to include PrideTV.
When MultiChoice ran OUTtv in October 2018 as a linear TV channel on DStv it removed some of the shows but only after the content started to screen because it was too risque for broadcast. Within the genre of PrideTV how did Vodacom decide what type of content you'll make available?
Zubair: All of the content on the platform is classified according to the Film and Publication Board (FPB) guidelines.
Coupled with that there is obviously content classification guidelines that are given to us from Vodafone, our parent company. Based on those two criteria we then look at each piece of content that goes in, each piece of content then gets reviewed, filtered, classified in terms of whatever it is and then placed on the platform.
The other thing is that it's a video-on-demand (VOD) subscription service so it's not a linear channel that runs 24 hours per day as some of the other things. The focus is more around "coming of age" stories, "coming out" stories, drama, information, challenges that people go through, light entertainment, content like that, that resonates with the LGBTQ community. A lot of caution is applied to ensure that there's nothing in there that's racy or inappropriate for our audiences.
How has Video Play grown as a VOD service and what does Vodacom envision it to still become?
Zubair: We launched Video Play in June 2018 and we've seen very positive, strong growth on the platform.
As we've reported in our Q3 results in December 2019 we had just over 1.9 million active customers on the platform with an enormous amount of subscription purchases.
Notably the difference between us and most other platforms is we allow customers to purchase a transactional viewity so it's like the video rental business, and we also offer subscriptions that start from 1-day subscriptions from as little as R5.
From a future-looking perspective our intent is to continue to optimise both the platform features - so bringing in different user-experience channels, for example, SmartTV's, set-top boxes and so forth, so that people can enjoy Video Play in more places than their phones, laptops and tablets.
We already, for instance, support ChromeCast, we're now busy working on an AndroidTV version and we're talking to some of the big TV manufacturers to start building SmartTV apps. As you know there are quite a few of these guys so it's not a quick thing but that's the next big thing for us.
There's also going to be a very big focus for us on linear television because it's the one thing that we've been very cautious about. We currently have two linear TV channels.
The one is from KwaZulu/Natal, 1KZN TV, which produces a lot of content out of KZN in the isiZulu which is one of the most spoken languages in our country, so it made sense to us that if there are 20 million Zulu-speaking people in our country that we go and secure content that is in Zulu.
The second linear TV channel we brought on was GAUtv and we're starting to see audiences and we're continuously talking to more local channels. We're also looking at some international TV channels. We want to give a different channel experience for customers. It's going to be a slightly different model in terms of how we take it to market which we will unveil closer to the time.
What has Vodacom learnt from the mistakes and failures of other VOD services in South Africa of which we've already seen several starting with VIDI and Cell C black being the latest?
Zubair: Look, I'll be very honest right. We don't really look at what the other guys have done right or wrong.
Each person that launches a platform has a specific version of how they think it will succeed and we've confined a lot of our focus on doing what we believe make sense for our customers.
If it's okay I'll rather focus on talking about what I think we are focusing on that we believe is working for us.
In my mind, I think we're working exceptionally hard to try and bring down, one, the cost of content. That means giving customers the ability to purchase for when they need it, modelled around how we've been very successful in giving customers access to what we call "micro-consumption" of airtime and data.
You then take that, and you map it against a typical lifestyle for not very wealthy people, and you soon start to get a very interesting correlation with based on lifestyle as opposed to affordability.
For instance, think of someone in the middle segment of the market that has a job - typically it's 6 days a week. They genuinely only have one day in a 7-day cycle where they have time for entertainment and leisure.
In that day, the person may or may not have access to large or small amounts of cash but he only wants to be entertained for one day.
So for our viewers we said lets create a platform where they can go to a platform, look at something that he likes and watch that or subscribe to it, but only for that day because it's all he really needs.
The second thing we think we got right very well is ease of consumption. Our platform doesn't do credit cards as an example, and it's a question of availability, risk and so on.
We allow customers to use their Vodacom airtime or their Vodacom post-paid wallet to add the transaction cost or purchase cost to that wallet.
So if you have R10 in your airtime wallet and you want to movie you don't need to give us a credit card. We get that not everyone has debit cards and credit cards and under current economic conditions, even if you do, you maybe don't have much money left. What you do have, is a trusted partner in Vodacom that manages that wallet and if you're not going to make a phone call with your airtime, why don't you use it to rent a movie for R10 or R5, or just a whole bunch of music videos?
We have thousands of them on Video Play and it costs R5 a day. You don't need a credit card, you take it from your airtime or add it to your post-paid bill and you get access.
The combination of those two things, as well as a mobile-first strategy and then started looking at set-top boxes (STBs) and linear TV channels, has certainly helped us.
I read this fascinating BBC article this week about Amazon as an online retailer and how it was and is able to data mine and know precisely what customers click and buy better than walk-in shops. Video-on-demand services also have a treasure trove of very precise viewership and usage statistics and data.
What's some of the content that's performing really well for Video Play and what has been the response to the addition of the American soap The Bold and the Beautiful?
Zubair: You're absolutely right. The big upside is that we have a lot of granularity on what users are doing on the Video Play platform - what they browse through, what they watch, which guides a lot of things like the recommendations we put forth in both our direct marketing as well as customer-specific propositions.
The second thing is that it also guides us in terms of acquisition - it tells us what we should be buying more of and what we shouldn't be spending money on.
Content like The Bold and the Beautiful is blowing the lights out. People are really, really excited to have it back and available. We're releasing episodes every week and are well ahead of where the SABC was when they dropped it.
At the rate we're going we'll be very close, if not on par with the American timeline soon. The response we've seen from that is really, really phenomenal, the views are going up, people are really enjoying The Bold and the Beautiful experience. We've got some of the back-episodes of Generations which is also performing incredibly well and customers are enjoying it. I think there's a type of nostalgia-effect that people can go back several episodes or several seasons and watch something.
A lot of that is a function of 12-months of customer usage behaviour that showed that there's a huge penchant for drama, for local, for compelling entertainment.
We're spending a lot of energy to try and acquire that kind of content, which as you know is not so simple to do, and some of them come with enormous price tickets.
What has been the impact of Eskom's loadshedding in South Africa on Video Play and Vodacom's VOD service? Do consumers watch more when they don't have electricity and do usage spike since they don't have working TV sets or is usage less when the lights are out?
Zubair: It's a mixed bag. When the loadshedding is quite severe - when it's a Level 2, Level 3 type of environment then we see a mixed version across the country.
In some parts of the country we see consumption go up - but for a very limited period - for about 35 minutes or so. Then in other parts of the country we see no change - it stays exactly the same as it was, with or without loadshedding.
It's a bit of a difficult thing to say to you "yes it does" or "no it doesn't". But does it have an impact on the business? Yes, absolutely. It has an impact on the network as well and affects our business. We run a video streaming service. If the consumer has no internet connectivity you're not streaming anything - whether it's us or anybody else for that matter.
And there's also the issue of do I watch movies on my phone or keep the battery for in case something might happen and need to make a call or something like that. It's really mixed though. We don't see a definitive correlation between the two.
