With the recent launch of Viacom18’s VOD service OTT platform – VOOT, it’s quite evident that kids have been given more importance and are targeted at as they constitute an important chunk of the viewers. And with the growing digital age, kids are proactive and even a five year old is consuming data on a daily basis. Their content consumption habits is changing on a daily basis due to explosion of new platforms, genres, formats and devices. FICCI observed an interesting ‘Kids go digital’ session on how technology and digital media together create an active, hands-on, engaging and empowering platform for children.
The panel consisted of Chu Chu TV, CEO, Vinoth Chandar; Nazara Technologies, CEO, Manish Agarwal; Viacom18 Digital Ventures, COO, Gaurav Gandhi and two young entrepreneurs, Godimensions, co founder, Shravan and Sanjay Kumaran. The panel was being moderated by Whizkidz Media, founder, Amit Agarwal.
Right from a toddler to a grown, there’s no one who might have not been exposed to the digital media. YouTube has been playing quite a significant role in the digital space with nursery rhymes receiving immense number of hits on a daily basis. Even games are playing an important role in this segment as with the boom in the tablet and especially smartphone market, games are being consumed like never before especially those that are based on kids favourite cartoons.
In order to retain kids for the game you developed, two factors needs to be kept in mind. First is the fact that the game mechanisms shouldn’t be messed around with as the kids need to understand the service mechanism as ‘familiarity breeds more content’ and secondly the visuals, colours and images play an important factor in helping a game get traction as it takes only 3 seconds for a kid to decide if they will be coming back to the game or no believes Manish.
Sanjay also agrees to the fact that kids prefer going back to something that’s more vibrant, has good content and overall delivers good visuals.
Edutainment based games are also available but kids nowadays are smart enough to figure out they are being taught in form of a game and so they can’t be fooled. But in three years down the line with Nazara, Manish believes that they will have a zillion network of kids playing games and spending large amount of time experimenting and educating themselves.
Currently when it comes to marketing for kids content, out of the Rs 20000 crores spent on advertising on television space only Rs 300 crores are spent on kids content. And Gaurav states that ‘CPM’s in India is pathetic!’So to market kids content, YouTube and TV are the best way to reach out to them.
Having dealt with YouTube for a long time, Vinod feels, “Content is all that matters. We believe that our content should be more of fun and that we deliver good quality content. For us marketing and monetisation plays a secondary role as we prefer concentrating on the content.”
Chu Chu TV plans to launch many more channels in the near future and expand their horizon with not just animated content but also live action kids series. Currently they target the zero to four age group and are planning to produce content for the five to seven age group as well. They are also on the verge of coming up and rolling out Chu Chu TV character based merchandises as well.
Most of the kids content are either in english or hindi so the question lies, how important does language play when it comes to kids. To which Amit states, “Kids don’t care about the language as long as the content and visuals are eye grabbing.”
Tamil and Telugu content for kids is picking up on the YouTube space and it’s predicted that regional languages will play a significant role just like english or hindi language in the coming months.
The kids segment has always played a crucial role and who says that kid going digital hasn’t arrived? It has definitely arrived long back and the future is going to be mind boggling. This could be observed with the VOOT app as it has a dedicated kids section that feels like it’s an app within an app and Gaurav says that within this year, we might get to see a ‘VOOT Kids app!’
Exciting times lay ahead for the blooming kids as well as digital industry as now India is finally embracing and producing more of local content in the kids segment across industries.
