Study: Jazz content diversification set to double revenues
November 6, 2024
A study by the TM Forum suggests that Pakistan mobile operator Jazz is set to double its revenues by 2027, spearheading a digital revolution in the country and ensuring digital inclusivity.
The opportunity is huge. Pakistan has a population of 244 million, of which 64 per cent are under the age of 30. Demand for digital services is high and growth potential enormous. Aamir Ibrahim, CEO of Jazz, has announced that his company will double its revenues by the end of 2027, with a quarter of this coming from non-telco businesses such as fintech platform JazzCash, Garaj Cloud services, and digital streaming service Tamasha.
Key to attaining its target of doubling revenue by 2027, is its ability to identify new opportunities and effectively exploit them.
These opportunities include Jazz’s streaming content app, Tamasha, which was launched in 2021 and has since become Pakistan’s largest home-grown over-the-top (OTT) platform. Jazz had seen how quickly YouTube was growing amongst the digital savvy youth sector in Pakistan and recognise the potential as customers moved away from traditional, linear TV.
It realised that while many international OTT platforms were available, there was a lack of local content and conceived Tamasha to bridge that gap and cater to the rapidly increasing number of smartphone users in the country. With Tamasha, it wanted to bring conventionally consumed TV content to the mobile handset and make it accessible to everyone.
Earlier in 2024 Jazz also launched a new sub-brand ROX, which is tailored to the needs of the 64 per cent of the population that is under 30. ROX is designed to be a youthful, fully digital brand and offers packages that meet the needs of young people’s hyper-connected lifestyles. It has partnered with leading lifestyle brands to offer customers exclusive deals and discounts, and comes with premium subscriptions to apps such as Tamasha, Bajao (a digital music streaming service) and GameNow.
Meanwhile, the GameNow app was launched in early 2024 as a Play Store alternative for Pakistan’s 30 million gamers. It supports a variety of gaming experiences such as casual, hyper-casual, multiplayer, game streaming and e-sports games. The platform offers a range of price plans and flexible payment options to users, integrating digital vouchers within the app to streamline the process of buying and redeeming vouchers for various in-game items. Besides serving as a central gaming hub, GameNow also offers streaming services, allowing users to watch live gameplay, tutorials and reviews.
Jazz’s transformation is highly commercially driven, so it wanted to be able to precision market its services, as well as cross-sell and upsell to customers. It is doing this by detecting customers who are already using another streaming service (such as YouTube), which then triggers a real-time niche marketing campaign aimed at encouraging them to switch to Tamasha. This has resulted in 11 million real-time, automated and precise marketing campaign triggers per day and a seven-fold increase in Tamasha users to 4.3 million. It has used the same capabilities to triple the number of Deikho (an original content platform for streaming) users in a year, grow JazzCash (x150), the music platform BaJao(x70), and Smart World users (x4) and increase customer engagement – for example, during the T20 Cricket World Cup engagement was up by 6.4 per cent and during the Pakistan Super League it was up 20 per cent.
According to Muhammad Latif Hussaini, Head of Core Planning and Operations, Jazz’s success is based on “really understanding individual customers and groups of customers, and meeting and anticipating their needs”.
Source: TM Forum, Jazz Accelerates Service Monetization with WISDOM, 2024