When I won ZEE5 Designathon

For ideas to make ZEE5 number 1 OTT platform

Introduction

ZEE5 is an Indian subscription video on-demand and over-the-top streaming service, run by Zee Entertainment Enterprises. It was launched in India on 14 February 2018 with content in 12 languages. ZEE5 has over 10 millions of daily active users on its platform.

Designathon

ZEE5 conducted a Designathon in Dec 2021 amongst all designers, where we had to present a unique idea which is not available on any other OTT platform. So I was looking for a problem to fix and checked our previous user interview documents. And I picked…

“I cant watch it with my family”

From our user interviews ZEE5 UX Research team found that, some of the ZEE5 content is not suitable for children and users feel awkward to watch it with their family even if they like it.

ZEE5 Target User Personas

User Research

Note: These interviews were conducted by UX Research team only

We got to know that even if the content is “Rated”, still our users want to be comfortable to watch it on their TV with his/her family.

Awkward moment is about to start, Family members start looking here and there

The inspiration

So I started working on it, and it remembered me when I was in school, I was a die hard fan of Roadies and it was available in both version, Censored version on TV and Uncensored version on its site.

The Solution

I came up with an idea to provide an option to our user to watch the content as they want, censored or uncensored. So users can turn the “Kids Safe” filter ON to watch it without awkward scenes(sex, nudity, foul language, violence, etc) or they can turn it off to watch the uncut version.

TV Player Screen with Control

ZEE5 detects that awkward moment is coming

Kids safe mode will automatically skip the Awkward moment

Business Model

Smart TV will be the future of entertainment industry and if our user is comfortable to watch ZEE5 with his/her family, they will be easy to convert and retain.

This Idea Won ZEE5 Designathon 2021

I presented “Safe Mode” to our Product Head(Nitin Mittal) and won the competition.

Challenges

1. We need to check, if we can mute the inappropriate words or we have to skip those as well.

2. Users are not returning back

From our Mixpanel data, we got to know that maximum number of “Guest users” are not returning on ZEE5. We started looking for ideas to increase the user retention on our platform.

The Inspiration

I play PlayStation a lot, and if we purchase Sony PlayStation Membership, we get 2 new games for free every month, available to download in that month only. So along with my PS friends, I always wait and check Sony PS site for upcoming free games again and again.

2–3 Free games every month for Sony PS Members

The Solution

So I thought that if we can have a “Movie Rail” which will offer Premium movies for free for one day and we will reveal that Premium movie the day user can watch it.

So our user will have to at least open ZEE5 once a day to check which premium movie he/she can watch for free. And even if the user does not have the threshold interest to watch the movie, because of scarcity user will tend to watch it. Because otherwise next day it will not be available.

Business Model

The more user watch the content, the more we will earn from advertisement from free users. And these returning users will become our daily active user and will be easier to convert.

Challenges

This idea was highly praised by the PM and CPO but when we reached out to Business and Content team, they were not ready for it. There were challenges from content team to decide which content to be given for free. And the impact on business(Subscription purchase) was not certain. Maybe in future we can test it in tier 2 or 3 city with limited number of user.

Conclusion Note

Thanks for reading the article. Those were really interesting task and I thoroughly enjoyed working and researching for them.

For more work, follow me on Dribbble & connect with me on LinkedIn.

Cheers!!