In the rapidly shifting landscape of digital entertainment, HT Media found itself at a crossroads.

With the rise of streaming platforms and the fragmentation of content across dozens of OTT services, the legacy print media company saw an opportunity to reimagine how audiences discover and consume video.

The result was OTTplay, and during a recent Webinar presented by the INMA Product & Tech Initiative, INMA members walked through its five-year “making and remaking” process with Zafar Sawant, chief product officer at HT Media Labs, the company’s innovation arm.

The development process was anything but linear, he noted, and required multiple pivots and “lots of iterations” to finally create India’s largest OTT aggregator, which allows access to content from more than 30 OTTs in what Sawant referred to as a “super OTT app.”

Created by COVID-19

The idea for OTT Play emerged during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when theatres shut their doors and people were confined to their homes.

“Everyone was at home trying to figure out what to watch, where to watch — and Google was not doing a very good job at that point in time,” Sawant explained, noting that even if people knew what movie or TV programme or Web series they wanted to watch, finding it was still a challenge.

With over 80 OTT platforms operating in India — ranging from global giants like Netflix and Prime Video to regional players like ZEE5 and SonyLIV — users were overwhelmed. Managing multiple subscriptions, logins, and apps was an exercise in frustration, and even Google often failed to locate where programmes could be found — especially if they were hosted on lesser-known platforms.

“We wanted to solve for this problem,” Sawat said.

That desire gave birth to OTTplay, a centralised hub where users could search for any movie, show, or live channel, and access it without juggling multiple services. The vision was simple: one app, one login, all the content.

A massive undertaking

The initial phase focused on aggregating metadata from across the OTT ecosystem. This meant crawling and indexing over 200,000 movies and shows across multiple languages from around the world. From there, the team had to find which ones were available in India.

Once it was narrowed down to those available titles, a new question emerged: “How do we decide which ones you should watch based on your preferences and your interests?”

To answer it, the team “built a lot of algorithms and experimented with a lot of algorithms to get you the best five recommendations.”

The app, which was released in 2021, addressed the original challenge, but it was quickly apparent the solution had created a new dilemma: “The problem was, if I give you a very good recommendation and it has five seasons with 10 or 20 episodes each, I’m done for almost a month or two weeks, and there is no incentive for me to return to the app.

Worse, users complained that OTTplay directed them to external platforms like Netflix or Prime Video, where they still had to purchase subscriptions. Once again, the product needed to evolve.

“We assembled an editorial team and we wrote about everything that’s out there, about every OTT, every new Web series, every new TV show, what’s happening, what’s releasing, when is a new season coming, how is it being received by the audiences,” Sawat said.

This gave users a reason to return regularly, even if they weren’t ready to stream. The app became not just a discovery tool but a destination for entertainment journalism.

The team also learned a critical lesson: Iteration must be driven by user feedback and business viability. Instead of striving for perfection, it launched fast, observed behaviour, and doubled down on what worked.

Connecting a fragmented ecosystem

By 2023, the next challenge made itself clear: “People were saying, why do we have to have multiple apps? Why can’t we have everything in one app?”

Resolving this required integrating streaming capabilities and building a robust video stack — player, storage, transport, and interface — across a fragmented TV ecosystem. Android TVs, webOS, Apple TV, Fire TV, and even Assemble TVs, which don’t have access to the Play Store, had to be supported.

With the launch of OTTplay 2.0, HT Media Labs made it available on 12 platforms, including mobile, Web, and TV platforms, and, by partnering with 50 OTT providers, was able to bundle the offerings into subscription packages. Of those, about 20 were later dropped due to low traction or business conflicts, but the core offering has remained strong.

In 2024, HT Media expanded OTT Play’s reach through strategic B2B partnerships, working with over 1,000 internet service providers (ISPs), banks, and TV manufacturers. New bank customers received OTTplay subscriptions as perks, ISPs bundled it with Internet plans, and mobile and TV manufacturers pre-installed the app.

“There’s a lot of backend work, a lot of do-it-yourself tools have to be built in the backend,” Sawat said.

Results and future goals

The results reflect just how well HT Media Labs has done its job. OTTplay’s app rating climbed from 3.5 to 4.5 stars, reflecting widespread user satisfaction.

“Consumption a grown 13x,” Sawat said, “so if last year people watched 100 hours, this year, it’s 1,300 hours of consumption on the platform.

Revenue is also growing by four to five times each year, driven by diversified sales channels and creative campaigns that range from flash sales and social media promotions to residential society booths and payment app integrations.

For all it has accomplished, Sawant said there’s one thing that’s eluding the app:

“We are getting a lot of love, a lot of people are liking the offering, and we recently got Amazon Prime Video and Jio Hotstar,” he said. “The only thing right now which is missing on the app is Netflix, which I hope we get soon.”

He said that, throughout the journey, the team never targeted perfection; it tried building something that worked, and then improved upon it.

“To be very honest, I was embarrassed by a lot of things that we launched; either it was slightly slow or laggy. But we still went ahead,” he said. “Whatever worked, we kept, and a lot of things didn’t work.”

However, each phase built on the last, with learnings carried forward. And as the platform continues to scale, HT Media is focused on delighting users, expanding partnerships, and refining its recommendation engine to serve India’s diverse landscape.

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