Hyderabad ranks 2nd in OTT platform viewership: Report

Hyderabad: A viewership trends study for July 2023-July 2024 reveals that Hyderabad ranks second in content consumption on the ZEE5 OTT platform. The study also notes a rise in viewing time for regional language content and increased engagement from non-metro cities.

The study noted that while Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Delhi lead in metro viewership, the OTT platform has also attracted 40 percent of its audience from tier 2 and 3 cities. ZEE5’s annual user engagement grew by 25 percent with regional language content seeing a notable rise in viewing time.

Further, Hyderabad OTT also recorded the highest number of viewers for 4K streaming, with a 278 percent viewership increase from South India and a 310 percent increase from North India.

ZEE5 shared its top-performing titles over the past year, with Sirf Ek Banda Coffee Hai, a direct-to-digital movie, recording the highest viewing time, while Taj was the most-watched original series.

Commenting on these trends in Hyderabad, chief business officer of the OTT platform, Manish Kalra stated, “Over the past year, we’ve added numerous titles to our post-theatrical and original content library. Audiences spent a total of 85 billion minutes on the platform from July 2023 to July 2024, with viewership spanning diverse audience groups and regions.”

A previous study shows that with an average watch time of over 3 hours every day, 52 percent of over-the-top (OTT) content consumers in the city prefer Hindi language content, 28 percent prefer English content while only 14 percent gravitate towards Telugu content.

Among the female audience, 60 percent prefer Hindi and English content over Telugu, says the Hyderabad-based marketing consultancy, Red Matter Technologies’ (RMT) new report ‘Understanding Paid OTT Subscribers of Hyderabad’.

The report also observes that regional players are struggling to gain penetration and affinity among the people on OTT platforms. The report says that the audience of Hyderabad is indulging in over 3 hours of OTT content every day, with weekends showing 10 percent higher viewership than weekdays.

Hyderabad’s under-26 population prefers watching their OTT shows alone as they tend to gravitate towards more personal and individualistic shows. More than half of the above 35 population of the city, that is 55 percent of them, show a stronger preference towards watching TV with family members.