In support of its rapidly growing global business that has landed at a number of new territories over that last few months, over-the-top service ZEE5 is to deploy the Kaltura TV Platform Player.
The OTT streaming platform launched in India in February 2018 and offers both free and paid premium on-demand content, including originals, as well as linear TV channels. The service’s content library comprises over 3500 films, 500 TV shows, 4000 music videos, 35 plays and 90 live TV channels across 12 languages and is available online via www.zee5.com, as a Progressive Web App (PWA), and on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV Stick. It also supports Chromecast.
Over 2019 ZEE5 has rolled out 25 original shows and is committed to launching 72 or more shows by March 2020. It has crossed 70 million gross downloads since launch on the Play Store and had 76.4 million global monthly active users globally as of June 2019.
Original content launched so far include widely acclaimed Kaafir, Rejctx – new age thriller drama, Barot House – a suspense drama film, Posham Pa – psychological thriller, Jamai 2.0 – a romantic thriller starring Ravi Dubey and Nia Sharma which is a digital sequel of popular television series Jamai Raja, Coldd Lassi Aur Chicken Masala - an Indian romantic comedy web series starring Divyanka Tripathi and Rajeev Khandelwal and Mission Over Mars (MOM) – Sakshi Tanwar, Mona Singh-led drama series to name a few.
In its latest development, ZEE5 has formed a distribution partnership with Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus for its soon-to-be launched smart TV sets, OnePlus TV.
The deal with Kaltura is designed to ensure that the service ensures a ‘seamless and high-quality’ entertainment experience for audiences across connected devices. Kaltura says that its TV Platform Player provides ZEE5 with market-leading quality of experience (QoE), while supporting over 8,000 devices, and providing scale to accommodate ZEE5’s global ambitions. The player also includes native support of advertising insertion and measurement and will assist ZEE5 as it introduces new features such as new advertising formats and gamification of the video experience.
“We are thrilled to partner with Kaltura to implement [its] flagship Cloud TV offering on our platform. This is one of the important partnerships in establishing ZEE5 as India’s fastest growing ConTech brand, as it will allow us to scale up and bring more people to sample and watch content across 12 languages,” commented ZEE5 India CEO Tarun Katial. “The Kaltura TV Player will better enable us to stay ahead of the quickly changing market with the rapid proliferation of devices, across various network connections, and growing consumer demand. With this partnership, we want to reinstate our commitment to democratise ZEE5’s 100,000+ hours of content by making it accessible for consumer viewing anytime, anywhere.”