ALTBalaji has reported revenues of Rs 1.2 crores for the quarter ended 30th June 2017, up 50% from Rs 0.8 crores in Q1 FY18. Loss after tax for the business was Rs 18.1 crores, up over 10 times from Rs 1.8 crores in Q1 FY17. Q2 EBITDA was at a loss of Rs 19.2 crores. ALT Balaji said its gross billings for the year are now at Rs 3.2 crores, up 60% from Rs 2 crores at the end of the last quarter. Note that the percentage growth is at a low base.

During the quarter, Nachiket Pantvaidya, CEO of ALTBalaji, took on the additional role of Group COO of Balaji Telefilms.

The company had investments of Rs 179.9 crores in Mutual Funds. It reported an other income of Rs 1.2 crores for the quarter.

The service was launched on April 16th 2017, and thus figures are not comparable to last year, especially since there were no revenues. ALTBalaji has increased investment and begun “expensing content and marketing spend”, the company said in an investor presentation. It says that it has invested Rs 125.2 crores so far in the business, as of 30th September 2017, but plans to follow “a very controlled cash burn linked to subscriber revenue growth”.

Operational data:

8.3 million app downloads (excluding direct downloads from its website). This was 4.2 million at the end of June 2017.

270 million+ Minutes of Video consumed. This was 160 million minutes at the end of June 2017.

100,000+ Daily Active Users. No comparative data is available for June 2017.

97 minutes average watch time per user (Average time per subscribed user is calculated based on minutes consumed per active session of use). This was 72 minutes at the end of June 2017.

Note that in September, ALTBalaji did a deal with Vodafone for Vodafone Play. Telco deals usually deliver high viewer numbers but tend to contribute much less, in terms of ARPU. One data point that ALTBalaji hasn’t updated in its results is of the number of users completing a full series. This was 125,000+ at the end of June 2017.

Content added during the quarter included original shows like Class of 2017, Cybersquad, Pammi Aunty and over 25 hours of stand up comedy in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi. ALTBalaji claims to have one of the largest collection of original comedy videos (outside of Youtube) in Hindi and other Indian regional languages. In an earlier presentation to investors, Balaji Telefilms had pitched that it would launch a new show every fortnight, at around 32 new shows for the year, for the first year, apart from having over 100 hours of kids content.

Results: Financials / Presentation