Voot

» see voot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Voot never reached Turkey and was never meant to. It was built for a market where the phone is the television and where mobile data got cheap faster than anywhere else on earth, a set of conditions i have read about rather than lived inside. Writing it up means taking the Indian streaming war on its own terms instead of measuring it against Netflix.

Viacom18 launched it on 29 March 2016. The company was a joint venture built around Reliance and Viacom, and the catalog was the obvious one: everything Colors and MTV had already broadcast in India, with a Bollywood library sitting behind it. The service was free and paid for by advertising, which in 2016 India was the only model with real reach.

Originals came next, and Bigg Boss OTT was the one that mattered. Taking the biggest reality format in the country and running an online-only season of it on a free app is a direct way to buy an audience, and it worked. Voot Select arrived in February 2020 as the paid tier, and in March 2021 a deal put Paramount and Showtime titles behind it.

None of that settled anything. The Indian market was being decided by whoever could afford to lose money longest, and by 2022 the answer to that was Reliance.

~ the case file ~

~ the actual end ~

Reliance already owned JioCinema, which had started life as a throw-in for mobile subscribers. In April 2022 Bodhi Tree Systems, a vehicle backed by James Murdoch and Uday Shankar, put money into Viacom18, and the Competition Commission of India cleared the restructuring that September. Reliance came out of it in control of both apps, which made one of them surplus.

The migration was quick and quiet. New Voot originals started premiering on JioCinema in June 2023, a season of Bigg Boss OTT among them, which told anyone paying attention where this was heading. By late July the Voot app had been pulled from both stores and subscriptions stopped selling. In August the merger completed and roughly ninety percent of Voot Select subscribers were carried across to JioCinema Premium.

Then JioCinema won the thing it had been assembled to win. It took the IPL streaming rights and gave them away free, a move only a company with Reliance behind it can make, and it broke every concurrent viewership record in the country doing it.

~ the long tail ~

The destination did not last either. In early 2025 JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar were merged into JioHotstar, so anyone who started on Voot in 2016 has now been moved twice without ever choosing to move. Their watchlist has migrated across three brands and two ownership structures, and the shows have mostly survived while every interface around them was replaced.

That is the shape consolidation takes in a market that grew this fast. Nothing here died of neglect or of failing to find an audience. Voot was working on the day it was switched off, which is a different kind of death from most of the ones on this site, and it is becoming the common one.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »