Eros Now to add 46 new titles, including 33 film premiers and 13 original series, in 2021

Eros Now will add 46 new titles in the coming year, including 33 film premiers and 13 original series, the video streaming platform said on December 11 as it announced its content pipeline for 2021.

"We will be announcing the theatrical studio slate in the first quarter next year. We will launch English programming for Eros Now Prime, which is the standalone English service," Ali Hussein, CEO, Eros Now, told Moneycontrol.

The movie offerings by Eros Now will include actors like Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Pankaj Tripathi, and Rajkumar Rao, among others.

Along with Hindi titles, the platform will be offering movies in eight different languages.

While the lion's share of revenue and users come from India, the platform is looking to invest in international markets to attract more users.

"While number of users from international markets like Australia, US, UK are smaller, but because we charge five dollars in the US, our dollar collection is more from these markets," said Hussein.

Eros Now increased its paid subscriber base by 6.9 million in the six-month period ended September 30 this year. And the platform overall has as many as 36.2 million subscribers.

Other video streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+Hotstar in India have 40 lakh subscribers, 44 lakh paid users and 2.4 crore subscribers, respectively.

While Eros Now saw growth in terms of subscribers this year, it was a struggle to deliver content due to the coronavirus pandemic.

"Last six months were tricky. New content dropped because of the lockdown," said Hussein.

Hussein said, "in the short term the cost went up because we had to take additional safety precautions," due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, he said overall the cost did not go up because "we are using a lot more technology which is helping to reduce time for pre-production and post-production. Plus, we are moving away from large celebrity-led content. All our content is more skewed to story-driven cinema. We are doing originals with story-driven narrative because large part of film production is talent cost. So, cost model has improved."