It’s gotten late off the blocks but it sure is looking to sprint ahead and fast. We are talking about the Zee network’s digital over the top (OTT) offering Ditto TV.

Zee Digital Convergence (ZDC) Chief Executive Officer Debashish Ghosh told PTI over the weekend that his goal is to double his company’s revenue from around Rs 30 crore to Rs 60 crore this year, with almost 95 per cent of it coming courtesy subscription.

With 1.8 million subscribers on a monthly basis and almost 60 percent of them being repeat viewers, Ditto TV is present in 167 countries. Most of its consumption is however happening in India. With the exception of Star and Sun group channels, Ditto TV offers 156 channels across 13 languages. Ghosh further told PTI that almost 30 per cent of Ditto TV subscribers consume live TV.

ZDC has invested around $5 million in Ditto TV over the past three to four years, Ghosh disclosed. That is slated to go up in the coming months as it starts pumping in money into original content. The first of these is a music based show called Life is Music; other programmes are being planned in-house as well as with outside producers.

Clearly, the OTT original content space is seeing a lot of action.

Netflix is slated to launch in India by mid next year and invest top dollar in cutting edge content. Star India’s Hotstar already has an average of 20 million users every month. It has paid a fat commissioning fee to stand up comedy group All India Bakchod to produce shows running over 20 episodes. Then it has been premiering some of its big-ticket Bollywood movies and TV shows on Hotstar.

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