Voot Select had a bumpy start to its OTT venture. After being planned for a while it finally took off in 2019 with the punchline “Made for stories”. Something that struck even at the launch event was the amount of thrillers that they had to offer.. Raiker Family, Asur and Marzi all seemed to have similar flavours.
To much to their relief, Asur took off and how! Shortly after the launch, the lockdown was imposed. With minimum marketing and powerful word of mouth, Asur became the talk of the town. The unconventional story and brilliant acting by the starcast were two main reasons for the show taking off! The other also managed to post some success. The sum total was that the launch of Voot Select was a big success. However, with no shoots happening, the app had to wait longer for the next instalment of the show and even longer for the second season for the popular shows.
In the last few years, there are plenty of tie-ups that one has seen in the OTT space. The idea is to offer more content and have greater content buckets for the audience for the price they are paying. Zee5 tying up with Alt Balaji was one great and talked about partnership. However, the two could not go ahead together for long.
Coming back to Voot, I feel that Voot Select has very little to gain from the content that Ullu has to offer. There are very few shows from the app that have become the talk of the town. There has been actually no show that has promoted people to buy its subscription. Sure fans would do so if the show features their favourite actor. But what I mean here is the show being so compelling that people buy the subscription. The way Test Case and Bose was for Alt or Scam 1992 was for Sony Liv.
Moreover, Ullu over time has not earned a great reputation. Most shows seem to be addressed to a very limited audience base that is not watching the content for its content value but because it can work around the ways and offer soft porn. Either ways none of it will add major value to the audience base of Voot.
Voot Select has been trying to create an image for its original content based shows. There is also a strong connect to its reality shows such as Bigg Boss and Khatron Ke Khiladi. Therefore, we feel that this is a match that is a complete misfit.
