Dekkho bets big on digital entertainment

Hand held devices; especially smart-phones, are becoming the first screen for new-age viewers, primarily when it comes to fresh entertainment. Dekkho, a new-age streaming platform is revolutionizing the way entertainment is consumed and delivered by building India’s first social video network. Indian consumers want online content free and Dekkho aims to create a long-term, three-way ecosystem for content producers, advertisers, and users through a free-to-use service.

Tanay Desai and Vinay Pillai, the founders of Dekkho raised $1.2 million from seven marquee angel investors in one of the largest seed funding rounds in India on December 2016. Headquartered in Mumbai, the platform aims to curate and showcase content close to its users’ hearts to enable a seamless access to the most relevant entertainment solutions, anytime, anywhere.

In an elaborate tete e tete with Baishali Mukherje, the duo shares the story of creating a platform that has the promise of emerging as the ‘Friday first day, first show’ of the Internet for Indian viewers!

Dreams are for real

We met while pursuing Master of Science from Columbia University, New York, and quit high profile jobs to follow our entrepreneurial dreams in India. We used our experience in the field of marketing, corporate finance, partnerships, and product strategy & design to help raise one of the largest seed rounds before Dekkho’s launch. With a goal to establish Dekkho as the default destination for all premium video-based content, we have sourced top talent from across global leaders such as Google, Ogilvy & Mather, and MTV. This aggregation of talented professionals has helped us create an open, non-hierarchical work culture at Dekkho that sees each employee contribute 60 per cent to the primary function and 40 per cent across the board. Our hiring philosophy aims at making dekkho the most desirable company to work for in India.

Turning gap into opportunity

The creative duo

Platforms such as YouTube are not considered an attractive option for content providers due to low payouts, while issues such as user-generated content and inferior content discovery plagued both viewers and content developers. This void in the digital entertainment industry was what Dekkho was established to address in March, 2016. By presenting only premium content across genres such as entertainment, food, travel, lifestyle, fashion, comedy etc to viewers for free, we provide fully customised solutions to meet a user’s daily need for the most perfect premium viewing.

The vision

Dekkho currently has over 12,000 hours of programming, which is made available by partnering directly with top digital channels such as Sony Music, Being Indian, Zee Music, Blush, Miss Malini, Times Group, ScoopWhoop, AIB, East India Comedy and Culture Machine. Content from national and international artists such as Coldplay, Beyonce, Badshah, Papon, ArjunKanungo, Micheal Jackson, Sia and Chain Smokers is also available on the platform, as is regional content in six Indian languages.

Through our team’s extensive global OTT experience, we understand the pulse of a young Indian viewing audience. This makes us confident that we will soon become the default destination for all online video-based Indian entertainment content across Android, iOS, and web platforms. The long-term vision is to create a video streaming culture through adaptive transcoding and subsidized data tariffs with multiple telecom service providers over the next five years.

The business model

The monetization model at Dekkho is based around highly-targeted, high-performance, and interactive advertising. With a team of 25 fulltime professionals with extensive experience in the media industry, we currently reach out to two million social media users on a monthly basis. The platform has several strategic partnerships with brands such as Paytm, FreeCharge, Lava, LeEco, Micromax, and Hike across segments in order to allow users in the partner ecosystem to also gain access to its diverse array of rich entertainment content.

Way ahead

We have plans to expand the team strength to 70 members by mid-2017, and produce original content in the short-to-medium format. We will also target launching an in-house artist label, and power networks like Ola, Uber, and Vodafone with its content as a value-added service. Our long-term vision is to create a sustained video streaming culture through adaptive transcoding and subsidized data tariffs with multiple telecom service providers over the next five years.

What kind of digital entertainment content keeps you hooked for longer hours? Please share your views.