mid-day's 42nd anniversary: The new-age box office

As movies traded theatres for OTT in the past year, Ormax changed the post-release conversation from box-office collection to viewership figures. Here’s the man who made it happen

Shailesh Kapoor, 45

The IIM Calcutta alumnus led his team as they launched Ormax Stream Track, a weekly listing of top 10 originals (films and series), in March 2020

What’s the first day collection?’  

‘Will the film reach the coveted Rs 300-crore club?’ 

No sooner would a Khan- or Kumar-starrer hit the screens than all eyes would be on its opening collections, with trade analysts keenly following its daily performance to see whether the film sets a new box-office record. With theatres shut down since March 2020 and films trading the big screen for an OTT release, box-office became a thing of the past. But did our ‘kitna banaya’ obsession end? Not really. The conversation merely shifted, thanks to Ormax Media.

Founded in 2008, the media research and tracking firm recognised the need-gap in the industry and launched Ormax Stream Track last March, evolving from a B2B company to the new-age OTT box-office in one swift move. “When studios started announcing their films for the web and there was [substantial] growth in the OTT-viewing audience, we decided to focus all our attention on [this product]. We were already engaging in [tracking] for some studios or platforms, but the lockdown gave us momentum to build on new ideas to measure [the reach of] OTT,” begins Shailesh Kapoor, CEO, Ormax Media.

With Stream Track, Kapoor — a product of IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta — brought about two significant changes. First, not only films, but also web series became a part of the rat race as Stream Track shared its listings of top 10 originals (films/series), week on week. Secondly, it added a new dimension by focusing on viewership patterns rather than viewership measurement. 

“Our job is to analyse what is happening around, and how people can use the data to make better content. For instance, we collected data from audiences for Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story. Basis our research, we figured that around 23 million in India have watched the show, but SonyLIV’s official subscriber base is only around two million. So, even if the two million subscribers and their families watched the series, the total figure comes to about six-to-seven million. There is a gap of 16 million, which means that a lot of people have watched it via piracy through apps like Telegram. That is how we gathered the insight that piracy is much bigger than what it was in films,” he explains.

Most OTT platforms refuse to share viewership figures, but Kapoor says they depend on online and telephonic consumer surveys to understand the offerings that viewers are aware of, and have watched through the week. “We have an analytics algorithm in the back-end, which converts all that data to give us an estimate. Listed companies like Netflix in the US, as per protocol, have to release the number of subscribers in their quarterly report. In India, ZEE5 is one of the companies that publishes its subscriber figures.”

So, which film fared the best in 2020? “Sushant Singh Rajput’s Dil Bechara was the top movie, but that was largely because it was free and due to its timing. Akshay Kumar’s Laxmii got great viewership, owing to the actor’s popularity. Among web series, Scam 1992 and Special Ops had high viewership. This year, The Family Man 2 has been a huge success, and Pagglait did well among films.”

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