Viacom18’s Youth, Music and English Entertainment (YME) cluster comprising of MTV, MTV Beats, Comedy Central, Colors Infinity, and Vh1 revealed its robust multiplatform content strategy for the year ahead in a media roundtable event held on March 10. 

In the past year, the repertoire of brands has seen positive growth with 9.8 billion impressions across TV, social media, and the network’s OTT platform, Voot. Along with this, the cluster also reported that they drew viewers during non-primetime through exciting sporting events. 

Emerging sports are trending in India

Anshul Ailawadi, Head of Youth, Music and English Entertainment at Viacom18 said that the company is trying to expose India to a wide range of life experiences. “Properties that we picked up on MTV were strategically scheduled for morning or late evening because our free commercial time is very critical for us,” Anshul said. “Emerging sports might interest audiences in Tier II and III cities provided that it makes them less intimidating and secondly, localized language format.” 

For the first time, MTV telecasted the NBA in Hindi, and Viacom18’s YME unit observed that 50% of its audiences came from rural markets, giving it a chance to be sampled by a lot more homes. Last year, Viacom18 entered into a three-year strategic partnership with La Liga, and today, Anshul revealed that the partnership has unlocked new markets for Viacom18’s YME unit.

“When you look at conventional ratings, you’ll see that in terms of absolute ratings. There is a growing difference between cricket and emerging sports, but in terms of growth, the latter is growing much faster,” Anshul added.

Entertaining programming for India’s youth

In 2022, the YME cluster is revolutionizing its content for India’s youth via entertaining “escape clusters” through daring and contemporary content offerings from fiction, non-fiction, sports, short-format, and snackable content.

In February, the YME unit began its foray into non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with the launch of the Fully Faltoo NFT platform which saw over 3,000 digital collectables sold out within a few hours. The company is also set to launch its maiden short-form video offering, Fully Faltoo, which features over a dozen new web shows and fully-entertaining snackable content. There’s also “KaanPhod,” a new business division that will provide emerging artists with a platform to showcase their talent. Season one of Mic Test on KaanPhod will introduce 10 new artists and their original tracks which will be available on MTV, MTV Beats, and VH1, social and streaming platforms. 

The multiplatform cluster also promises genre-defining entertainment and legacy shows. MTV Roadies, India’s biggest and longest-running adventure reality show will embark on its first international journey in South Africa. In addition to this, MTV Hustle 2.0 will continue on its quest to find India’s next big rap sensation, and with The Inventor’s Challenge, Colors Infinity brings to light the journey of an inventor–from idea to a working prototype.

Talking about the cluster scaling up its flagship formats, Anshul said that key insights from the company’s research revealed that entertainment has been a form of escapism for India’s youth. Anshul said, “We have been the first ones to give creators a voice. We realized that our audiences were everywhere and there is a lot of fragmentation in touchpoints with the audience. When we create content for TV or OTT, we have a very different perspective but a lot of young people are consuming different content available on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. We are very familiar with this market because we have been producing short-form content for brands for many years.”  

With an exciting content lineup in the pipeline, Anshul said that Viacom18’s YME unit plans to grow every property in its cluster tenfold and revamp and rejuvenate it with fresh insights that they have in terms of consumer habits. Anshul said, “We will dial-up our existing properties and also pivot towards digital by launching creator-friendly propositions in the form of Fully Faltoo, Fully Faltoo NFT and KaanPhod. We will also look at announcing a new IP on MTV in a couple of months. Our new content slate is aimed at fulfilling the different demand segments among the young audience.”