EXCLUSIVE: Lionsgate Play will provide free access to its entire content library for one week from October 18 to 24 as part of its “Gatecrash Lionsgate” campaign in India — just before the country’s major Diwali holiday.
This campaign will include complimentary access on Lionsgate Play to the Indian premiere of Paris Has Fallen, part of the Has Fallen franchise and starring Mehdi Meskar, Tewfik Jallab and Ritu Arya.
Now in its fourth year, the streaming service from Lionsgate India and Starz has focused on building a content library centered on Hollywood action films, with titles dubbed into four to five Indian languages.
Rohit Jain, President of Lionsgate Play (Asia), told Deadline that besides action, Lionsgate Play is seeing strong audience uptake in the horror genre — and he is also keenly tracking the popularity of Korean content.
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“We are probably going to take some bets in the coming year on Korean content,” Jain said. “Our service is growing very rapidly in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines, and in all of these countries, we’re starting to see that after Hollywood, Korean content is becoming a really important second area.”
Jain added that he is also looking at nonfiction and sports content as part of the platform’s future growth strategies.
Lionsgate Play currently has an audience reach of 25 to 30 million people, which Jain said gives the platform a “healthy subscriber base” to draw from.
“With that reach, we’re able to do a nice, solid, double-digit conversion to subscribers,” Jain said. “My business metrics — subscribers, revenue and profit-and-loss — everything falls into place from there.”
The platform’s library includes titles like Past Lives, Tokyo Vice, Normal People, The Iron Claw, The Beekeeper, franchises like John Wick, The Hunger Games and Saw, and award shows like the Primetime Emmy Awards, Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and BAFTA Awards.
The primary age range of Lionsgate Play’s audience is around 25 to 45 years old. 30% to 35% of the streamer’s audience members are female while the remaining 65% to 70% of audience members are male.
Jain said that his main priority is to continue expanding the platform’s reach. His company’s next target is to hit 50 million audience members.
“India is rather interesting because it’s one of the few markets where the local language production is bigger than Hollywood content in the share of pie,” Jain said. “In India, historically, Hollywood content was for a privileged set of audiences, so I think breaking those barriers of privilege and barriers of distribution have always been our guiding principle in everything that we’ve done so far.”
In India, Lionsgate Play has formed OTT bundling partnerships with Amazon Prime Video and Tata Play Binge.
Overseas, Lionsgate Play has formed global telecom partnerships with Dhiraagu in the Maldives; PLDT, Smart Inc and NCell in the Philippines; and Grameenphone in Bangladesh.
“We are constantly looking at trends in consumer viewership habits in order to make sure that we make it as convenient as possible for audiences to find content. You want to solve for reach, but you also want to solve for discovery, which really comes down to convenience,” Jain said.
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