Since the onset of the pandemic, 565 Hindi originals launched on major OTT platforms in India, but only 12 percent of them managed a peak Buzz of 15 percent or more on Ormax Stream Track, a weekly track of new OTT launches in India

The proportion of new launches that are managing to register significant Buzz have gone down with each passing year, highlighting how the content clutter is making it difficult for new launches to stand out, Ormax analysts Keerat Grewal and Aakriti Bhatia have opined in an article for the company, titled ‘Breaking the Buzz Barrier’.

The analysis sated that shows and direct-to-OTT films that do not rely on franchise or Bollywood support must have compelling audience propositions, backed by strong marketing, to avoid being lost in the ever-growing clutter of content.

Ormax Stream Track (OST) is a weekly track that surveys viewers of OTT original content in India to ascertain their response to upcoming and recently-launched shows. One of the key parameters reported in OST is called Buzz, defined as a score on a 0-100 scale, that measures percent of audience who recalled the show or film unaided, when asked to recall upcoming or recently-launched OTT shows or films.

Buzz is a strong indicator of the talk value of the property, which means the degree and effectiveness of conversations around it, among regular OTT audiences. Buzz typically peaks in the week of launch, or in the week just after launch, though some properties can peak two weeks after launch too, because of strong consumer pull (word-of-mouth), the analysis stated.

“Viewer attention is no longer undivided like the pandemic months. They are back to their routine, movie theatres have re-opened, life has moved on. But the content is being churned out at the same rate as the pandemic years,” the analysts emphaised.

“Of the 565 Hindi properties, 196 were launched in Apr 2020-Mar 2021, 188 in Apr 2021-Mar 2022, and the remaining 181 in Apr 2022-Mar 2023. Even as content production refuses to slow down, the accumulation of content over time adds to the clutter at the consumer’s disposal, making it even tougher for new properties to stand out,” they said.

Interestingly, the analysis found that there were only 21 originals where a Buzz of 15 has been achieved by a property originally designed for OTT, and without the support of Bollywood stars or franchise equity. Leading this list are ‘Paatal Lok’, ‘Panchayat’ (S1), ‘Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story’, and ‘Betaal’. It’s not a coincidence that all four are 2020 properties.