SonyLIV, Lionsgate partner in India for global content

What do you get when an online video streaming platform that lacks adequate English content, and a global production house that is a late entrant to India looking to scale up rapidly, come together?  An exclusive partnership.

SonyLIV, the over-the-top (OTT) video platform owned by Sony Pictures Networks, and Lionsgate, the Santa Monica, California-based entertainment company announced, on Thursday, that the two would be joining hands to make the latter’s hugely popular global entertainment content available in India through SonyLIV.

The deal, commercial aspects of which remain undisclosed, is a win-win for both entities.

SonyLIV was first launched in India in 2013, but at that time it was meant to be more as catch-up TV, airing previously aired content from the SPN bouquet of entertainment channels in India. Over the last couple of years, it has sought to reinvent itself by offering more diverse content to online viewers, including live sports (it aired the FIFA World Cup earlier this year), web original series, live TV, and movies.

While the revamped strategy has helped SonyLIV gain traction and around 35-40 million monthly average users at present, cutting-edge English entertainment content – of the kind that can give Netflix and Amazon Prime a run for their money – has been missing, agrees Uday Sodhi, executive vice president and head of digital at SPN. By embedding Lionsgate’s digital channel Lionsgate Play on to its own platform, SonyLIV hopes to plug this gap.

“We are bringing in more than 500 hours of content from Lionsgate, including some of the best shows available in the U.S. and globally, right away,” Sodhi told Fortune India. “For us, this is a strategically important partnership. The strategic direction in which we are moving is to look at premium users (who pay for content) and see what we can do for them. English content is not our strength yet and we wanted to fix that by getting in content from developed markets and competing with other platforms.”

The tie-up with Lionsgate will see some of its best known and critically acclaimed shows in the U.S. like Power (IMDB rating: 8.3), White Queen, and Sweetbitter make their debut in India. Though other global entertainment companies like Viacom (through Viacom 18 Media), 21st Century Fox (through Star India) and Disney have been present in India for long, Lionsgate only opened a dedicated India office in January 2018.

Rohit Jain, managing director of Lionsgate India admits that the $4.5 billion production house is probably too late when it comes to the linear TV space in India, which is dominated by the likes of Star India, SPN and Zee Entertainment Enterprises. But the explosion in online viewership of digital video content presents a good opportunity for Lionsgate to make its presence felt in India through tie-ups such as the one with SonyLIV, as well as a strategy that entails production of local content in Hindi and adaptation of its global content library to suit Indian tastes.

According to a recent report on the OTT sector by Kotak Institutional Equities, there were 250 million monthly average users of digital video in India, watching 7 billion minutes a day in FY2018. This is expected to rise to 650 million monthly users by FY2023.

“This partnership is more than a commercial arrangement for us. It is about creating consumption and demand for great quality content,” says Jain. “We are also focused on analysing the data that this partnership throws up, in terms of users’ viewing habits and how we can cater to that.”