“We will be the OTT of Marathi television”: Ashutosh Barve

Marathi-speaking audiences will have one more television channel to tune into from today (March 15, 2022) with QYOU Media Inc. launching Q Marathi, a Free-To-Air (FTA) General Entertainment Channel (GEC). Neeta Thakare, channel head, and Ashutosh Barve, programming head, Q Marathi speak about the network’s foray into the regional market beyond the Hindi speaking markets.

Usually we see the large networks enter regional content with one of the south Indian languages like Tamil or Telugu as it enjoys a strong viewership. However QYOU is venturing in with the third-most spoken language in India- Marathi.

“The whole state was very exciting for us. A lot of advertisers want to look at this. Maharashtra contributes a lot to the GDP. We are also headquartered out of Mumbai. So when we zeroed into the regional channels, we felt Marathi is the best language to launch with. We also saw a scope to do a unique content offering for the young Maharashtrians,” said Thakare.

The FTA channel will be available on leading DTH and cable platforms. The key players in the Marathi GEC genre include Star Pravah, Zee Marathi, Colors Marathi, and Sony Marathi. In the FTA space, Sun Marathi is the only GEC. Q Marathi intends to stand apart from these channels with its digital to television content.

“The market is dominated by dramas and mythologies for a major part of the day. The youth is now watching content on OTT and short format videos. We've created something which the young Maharashtra will resonate with. We're bringing some young edgy content onto television for the first time. It is OTT, YouTube and short format content that we have brought onto television. It’s the first time ever in the Marathi space,” Barve says.

Canada-based media firm QYOU Media Inc. has been providing content created by social media stars and digital content creators on its Hindi channel The Q. It provides digital creators a platform to showcase their content on the television. Keeping its DNA in mind, it wants to bring on board a digital creator economy in Marathi television space.

“Our core strategy is digital content on television. Right now we are the only platform that offers digital creators to be on television, which gives them a much higher reach and engagement. Going forward we will include a lot of interactivity,” he adds.

“During the pandemic, in the absence of fresh content on television, a lot of digital creators suddenly came up. But we wanted to be in the broadcasting space and not get into the OTT space. So we brought the digital creator economy and broadcasting together to make this TV channel,” Thakare adds.

She says this makes the channel unique in its space and its tagline ‘Bhannat Aahe’ (out of the world) represents that.

“We didn't want to be like every other channel in the category and wanted to be a little different. Our tagline ‘Bhannat Aahe’ describes this uniqueness in content,” she adds.

The channel will have distinct slots, like urban comedy, rural comedy, drama, animation, cooking. Being a family-oriented channel, its target group comprises both young and old, male and females, rural and urban. But they need to be young at heart.

“Our TG is young at heart. So while our content is not traditional, we are catering to older women as well as younger women. There is something for everybody in the family. So we have a family-inclusive TG with a young at heart skew,” he explains.

By bringing content that the young audience watches on digital platforms to television, the channel is attempting to hold back the youngsters who are moving away from the medium.

“The youth is watching content on digital platforms because television doesn't talk to them anymore. Television remotes are being controlled by the older women at home. Even the advertisers who want to associate with young Maharashtra are moving towards digital slowly. We're bringing in the content that the young audience is watching digitally, so then they can now watch it with their entire family,” Barve says.

But as the channel provides this digital content on television, is it then competing with Marathi-only OTT platforms like Planet Marathi?

Responding in the negative, Barve says synergies between digital and television are the future. “We see ourselves being the OTT of television. We already have the biggest Marathi YouTube channels on our platform. I would like to collaborate with the digital creative universe and put its content on our platform and vice versa. We don’t consider them as rivals, but collaborators and we see them nurturing the audience. More their audience grows, the more ours will grow. So we are not mutually exclusive. We see a good synergy happening with each other in the future,” he says.

The channel has already got brands like Pepsi, Dettol, Himalaya and L’Oreal on board as founder advertisers.

“Among Marathi channels, for the first time some of the biggest brands have come on board pre-launch as founder advertisers. There is a certain level of trust and faith that the entire advertising community has shown in us by coming on board,” he shares.