Unlike in the United States, Indian television is sparse with the amount of sports coverage that it provides. Only a small variety of sports are actually broadcast on Indian network television, primarily cricket and soccer, and the depth with which they are covered is very shallow.
Veqta, a Delhi-based over-the-top (OTT) digital network, are trying to tap into the large market of Indian sports fans that have an appetite for more sports than the usual network television offers.
“As a dedicated sports network, we will follow a ‘Freemium’ model with a large pool of content available to all users and selected premium content behind a paywall. This will include licensed content and also our flagship studio content across cricket, football, action sports, motorsports, basketball, tennis, badminton and a wide range of Olympic sports,” said Veqta co-founder Vikram Tanwar on the company’s model.
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The network will have quite a bit of free content, and some premium content that will require a subscription. Some of the content will be only available through their in-house platform, but Veqta will also be using other public platforms like YouTube.
Within the last two quarters, the OTT platform has been making some serious moves. First, in January, they teamed up with Ping Network, an Indian multi-channel network that partners with Google. With this, Veqta will be able to reach all of Ping’s 80 million viewers with their sports content. Initially, Veqta will solely have an MMA channel along with a multi-sport channel, but it has room to expand on Ping’s digital platform.
Also, in mid-May, Veqta closed out a $500,000 round of seed funding—that money coming from venture capital firm Chatsworth Management, along with Indian sports management company ITW.
Veqta is expecting their network to get quite a bit of traction in the first year, with expectations being set at 20 million for their in-house services and 80 million through other platforms.