WittyFeed Aims To Deepen Its Bharat Roots With OTT

“All three of us (STAGE co-founders) have been born and brought up in very small villages and towns of India. Even when we were serving American users, our story was always about building a startup from Bharat. And, which is where the idea started to turn up in our heads that we would do much better if we were to genuinely solve for Bharat,” said WittyFeed founder Vinay Singhal while talking about the company’s recent pivot to become a dialect-based OTT platform — STAGE. Founded by Parveen Singhal, Vinay Singhal, and Shashank Vaishnav in 2014, WittyFeed could raise a Pre Series A round in 2017 from investors like including former Facebook director Anand Chandrasekaran; HCL Technologies VP Apurva Chamaria and Innov8 cofounder Dr. Ritesh Malik among others. Witty Feed which concentrated infotainment targeted towards ‘Bharat’ the company felt a need to rebrand itself that would easily strike people’s minds, thus came to the name Nukkad, which means neighborhood in English. 

STAGE: A Dialect-Based OTT Platform 

For its OTT segment, STAGE planned to visit different directions having a focus on regional languages. The startup is looking forward to shows in regional dialects such as Haryanvi and others. 

The start-up in due course of time realized that OTT platforms are flooded with a lot of content and this will eventually be monotonous for the viewers so they decided to stand out of the crowd and focus on creating content which is value-driven for the users.

“STAGE differentiates itself from other OTT platforms like MX Player, SonyLIV, etc by creating high-quality informational content instead of dumb or sexual content that is being offered on existing Indian focused,” said Singhal.

For STAGE, the USP will be to offer unique and original content in local dialects such as Haryanvi, Rajasthani, Bundelkhandi, Bhojpuri, Konkani, etc through art forms such as comedy, folk, poetry, storytelling, and motivational content. Currently, the platform only brings Haryanvi content in its beta stage. The full launch of the platform will be happening in the coming months. 

The journey From WittyFeed To Nukkad By STAGE

Nukkad will continue to focus on producing information-led fiction content. “We do monologue premium content but the idea is to drive dialogue out of that monologue that we created. You can think of it as ‘Last week with John Oliver’, but for Bharat,” added Singhal

.The name has its origin from the everyday talk among the  ‘Bharatwasis’ (Indians in semi-urban and rural areas) which often takes place at local tea stalls, community meetings, street corners.

The platform offers to its people informative as well as entertaining and relatable content in the form of short videos, accompanied by fictional character-led shows under the category of entertainment, politics, health, fake news, tech, to culture, sports, lifestyle, and even finance. Nukkad in line with the popular Comedy Central shows by Jimmy Fallon and Trevor Noah, aims to bring world-class sensible and satire-based content to Indians in their languages that are easily relatable and familiar to them.

Nukkad cannot stop itself only with fictional content, the platform also gives a place to knowledge-driven content that considers complex issues such as financial literacy, current affairs, and more. Shows like Bubbly’  which is dedicated to movie buffs, ‘Raja Beta’ engaged in tackling the complex topic of financial literacy), Raju Panchayati’ (a character with an opinion on everything under the sun), ‘Nicky AIMS’ (a health-centric show) and more.  Nukkad good get a good number of viewers, In July 2020, Nukkad claims to have witnessed a reach of over 108 Mn and engagement of 3 Mn across its platforms.  Singhal on choosing topics for the platform said we pick topics that would generally seem very serious, boring, and some would even wonder how can anyone talk about it to Bharat and why. The company is value-oriented and believes in creating content that can provide value to the user. 

The platform runs with the idea that people are open to a lot of content these days and if a platform wants to grab the attention it needs to create value over time. “For instance, the topic of financial literacy is boring for even you and me. And we probably represent that top 10% user that we’re talking about. So for Bharat users, it can be a much more boring and alienating topic. Nobody has ever talked to them about financial literacy because everyone thinks why do they need to know about it. But maybe they need it the most. So we try to make these topics interesting for them,” said Singhal.

Brands support the platform by sponsoring shows on Nukkad who partner with the shows to establish themselves as a thought leader and attract more viewers to their platform. Some prominent names who have partnered with the platform include SBI YONO and Insurance Samadhan. With this central idea in mind, the company could figure out its target audience as everyone on the internet minus the top 10% users. 

The company is not into segregating Bharat by cities, because there are a lot of people from Bharat who live in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and similarly, a lot of them live in Indore, Jalandhar or Kota as well. 

Another major reason behind the rebranding was the realization that before the government put a stop on the  Chinese apps, the most popular content platforms in Bharat were companies like Weibo, TikTok, Helo, which were in the process of distributing sleazy content in the name of UGC or user-generated content. 

“So, we figured that if I am Bharat, my parents are Bharat, and my family is Bharat. We are definitely looking for better content. There is a market which is looking to consume high-quality sensible content but it’s just that nobody’s creating it,” said Singhal. That’s exactly what the company is trying to solve under this new vision, he added.

After the ban was called in various Chines Apps homegrown platforms like Chingari, Mitron, Bolo Indya and Trello have started gaining popularity in the country. STAGE however is very different from these existing platforms, in the fact  all its content is PGC (professional-generated content), written and shot by its team of creators. 

The company claims to have cut down its production cost since all the shows are monologues and are usually shot inside homes, this has helped in following the social distancing norms and limit any disruption in the production. WittyFeed who has been operating for a period of around for six years now, STAGE has bigger responsibilities on it and challenges to sustain in the market and this is probably the best time to when it can create its mark. It will be interesting to see whether STAGE can take WittyFeed ‘s place in the global arena.