Data-rich local Indian content provides fertile ground for tech companies

From creating local language content ecosystem and interactive platforms on smart TVs to helping people shop via video commerce, Indian content offers huge opportunities for tech and e-commerce firms

India’s digital content is experiencing phenomenal growth in the fast-growing short video and local language content space. It is turning out to be the largest and fastest-growing market in terms of engagement and monetisation for tech and e-commerce firms. 

One such firm betting big on this space is the local language technology platform VerSe Innovation. VerSe Innovation’s proprietary technology platform serves one out of every two internet users in the country across Josh and Dailyhunt, coupled with PublicVibe, the fastest-growing hyper-local video platform.

“Over the last 18 months, our business has seen massive explosive growth across our family of apps,” says Umang Bedi, co-founder of VerSe Innovation. “We have seen explosive growth emerging from the next billion users coming out of regional India.

Bedi said in the last 2-3 years the company solved various problems including unleashing the growth of local language creators and across genres of content. It solved a massive data science problem, where it ingests the content and matches it to the user's preferences using AI. It also solved the challenge of monetising the content. “We're now moving into newer areas, with our short video app and adding (new) apps,” said Bedi. “We intend to move this journey from content to commerce which is driven through video commerce, driven through influencers. We think that commerce is going to be overarchingly our next big bet that is really transformative in nature.”

This is because Josh has over 150 million MAUs (monthly active users), the best DAU/MAU ratio in the industry of 49 per cent and the highest retention. Dailyhunt serves over 350 million users every month offering content artefacts every day in 15 languages. PublicVibe serves over 5 million MAUs and 1 million daily active users (DAUs) and has over 6 million downloads on Play Store.

“In India 70 per cent of people don’t speak English, and that’s the largest and fastest-growing market,” says Virendra Gupta, founder, VerSe Innovation. “This is the middle of Bharat, which is the biggest problem to crack in terms of engagement and monetisation.VerSe Innovation has been able to crack it.”

It is this growth and scaling up of local language technology platform, that has helped VerSe to recently raise $805 million in the latest funding rounds from marquee global investors and increased the firm’s valuation to $5 billion. The funding is helping VerSe to both deepen and broaden its AI and ML (machine learning) and data science capabilities.  It is helping it to scale up engagement and retention metrics, drive deeper monetisation including influencers, e-commerce and live streaming and foray into Web 3.0 experiences. This is across its local language creator base of over 50 million as well as its local language content ecosystem, which experiences over 80 billion video plays per month.

Another tech company Glance is betting big on creating a disruptive lock screen-first discovery platform for live content, commerce and gaming. Launched in 2019, Glance which is backed by Google and Reliance is now one of the world’s largest mobile lock screen platforms with over 200 million active users. The firm recently launched Glance TV - a live, interactive content platform for the home screen or ‘screen zero’ of Android smart TVs. With live content and real-time on-screen interactions for users, Glance TV is aiming to completely transform the way people experience television.

Glance TV aims to be present on approximately 30 per cent of all smart TVs in India soon. The company plans to make Glance TV available globally and also intends to develop the same for other smart TV operating systems.

“We are transforming the way people are watching the same content. There are partnerships in place to bring the live experience onto the platform,” says Manish Gupta, senior vice president and GM, Glance. “There will be multiple experiences whether its commerce, games etc, all of those are brought together on a platform which is combining all the content that you want to watch.”

Gupta said that Glance is already available in around 200 million smartphones in the country. He said that there are around 76 million smart TV and in the next few years, the penetration of smart TV is going to increase tremendously, throwing up opportunities for the firm.

Glance TV users can interact directly in real-time with their favourite stars on their television home screens. They can attend personalised fitness training sessions, watch interactive cooking shows with celebrity chefs, or enjoy sports in community watch-along that replicate immersive, stadium-like atmospheres. Within shows, users can interact and shape the direction of the content through live comments, reactions, and polls. Using QR codes on live TV, users can buy tickets for movies and events, shop live, and even get their social media posts featured on Glance TV streams.

“For us commerce is going to be a big opportunity, but not the way standard commerce happens. Here the shopping experience is part of the content itself,” says Gupta of Glance. “We are trying to create an end-to-end experience doing commerce in a manner where you’re actually learning and have more opportunities to buy.”

Gupta said normally when you see any other social media platform which are available on phones where it’s easy to express your emotion through emoji the normal interaction rate is around 4-5 per cent. “On Glance TV, we are consistently seeing 17-20 per cent interaction rate, where people are going and clicking on those emojis and expressing what they feel,” says Gupta. Glance recently attracted $200 million in a funding round led by Jio Platforms, the subsidiary of Reliance Industries (RIL) and its valuation rose to $2 billion.

E-commerce firm Amazon is also witnessing hundreds of millions of Bharat’s customers’ various needs including shopping, paying bills, playing games, accessing prime music and video or miniTV are being fulfilled on Amazon.in app and website.The company said if one combines the downloads of its platforms such as 'Amazon.in' shopping app and Prime Video app, there are close to 500 million downloads, which is almost 75 per cent of the registered internet users in the country today. More than 86 per cent of the new customers on Amazon.in are coming from tier 2 and below geographies.

“Customers are loving the experience of shopping in a language of their choice and convenience,” says Kishore Thota, director, customer experience and marketing, Amazon India. “In 2021, more than 5 million customers shopped in Indian languages and more than 90 per cent of these customers are from tier 2 and below cities.”

Millions of customers are also watching Amazon’s miniTV offering within the shopping app that provides a subscription-free entertainment service with a curated and diverse content offering by leading and emerging digital content creators.

The firm has also been working on introducing newer customer experiences across interactive avenues like videos, voice and regional language. The company has introduced a regional language shopping experience in Hindi. Today, Amazon has expanded it further with the addition of other languages including Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi and Bengali. Today, millions of Amazon customers are engaging with the video content in the product pages resulting in a simplified shopping experience and increased conversions.

“Last year, Amazon expanded its voice offering with the launch of voice shopping experience in Hindi,” says Thota. “Customers are able to search for products, track their orders, navigate to various touchpoints on the company’s Android app, add items to the cart using their voice in Hindi or English.”