How Aparat Is Bringing Entertainment Industry to Its Platform

Aparat the biggest video-sharing website is bringing the entertainment industry to its platform in Iran. How can they possibly do that? This is the question that we are going to answer in this post.

Aparat was a simple video sharing website in the past couple of years. SabaIdea launched Aparat in 2011 and from that time until now, they’ve been growing with a very fast pace. They have a massive number of visitors and users. On daily basis Aparat has 6+ Million video plays, 6+ thousands video uploads, 25+ Million unique visitors per months and 5 Million on Aparat app. They had a healthy growth rate over the past years but it was time to do something that has never been done before. Mainly the official TV channels in Iran couldn’t keep up with the contents that satellite and private channels would provide. So it was time for Aparat to take some action and bring some innovation to its platform. They brought quality content production and UGC to life, and supported few hard talk shows and made a very good buzz about their UGC contents. It’s worth noting that UGC contents were mainly about cool videos that people would produce by themselves.

You Can Choose Whatever You Want to Watch

It’s not a big news that official TV channels don’t allow you to pick the content that you want to watch. But it’s a new era in Iran, with the recent development of mobile internet and internet penetration, it was time for the people to demand what they want to watch and when to watch it. Aparat provided this opportunity for people to fulfill this wish with their its contents. We have many talented people in Iran with great ideas for creating video contents or even hosting a show. Before these new features from Aparat, people would have posted their videos online or grabbed some videos from other sources and post it on Aparat, but most of it weren’t their originally created contents. With these new features that Apparat launched, people started to look at the platform as a hub for watching cool and unique video contents online. And in the past few months as a source for watching exclusive talk shows. Right now the image of Aparat has changed massively, the platform is not a place to post random videos anymore, now people would expect to see more of these quality talk shows with famous hosts.

Why It happened Now?

As mentioned before, the internet infrastructure and people weren’t ready to see exclusive programs on Aparat. The Internet cost was too high (And still is) and people wouldn’t had an idea, where star hosts would air their shows online, due to the fact that no such platform existed before. Iranians mostly expected to watch a very short and casual videos on Iranian websites. Sure, we watched many exclusive contents on Youtube, but it’s Iran, and people didn’t see anything similar to it from an Iranian company.

Aparat has done a very good job to the point where it has gone viral. One of these shows has nearly 200K viewers each episode, not to mention that many people would download the whole show and pass it on to their friends and family because of high price of internet. People talk about these hard talks or shows on daily basis. Many of these shows became headlines on news outlets.

And It’s just a Start

With these new features from Aparat, many ecommerce companies and old school international brands that are working in Iran became a sponsor for these shows. With these brands involved we can expect to see more shows produced, backed by the capital the sponsors provide. Not to mention that because it’s not national TV, shows can talk about topics they can’t possibly bring up on national TV channels. It means that the shows can be have more interesting and unique content not seen anywhere else, and the only place to watch them is on Aparat.

Another interesting feature that is part of their channel to gather more views and customers,

is a special service for the upcoming parliament election of Iran. You can find campaigns of the political candidates and parties on the platform. Aparat Offers them official channels, poster design, hyperlink to their websites, publishing their videos on its dedicated page for parliament election, professional video production and motion graphics for their campaigns.

Last Words

With these new channels and features from Aparat we can expect to see some tough competition with satellite TV shows or even some day with official TV channels. With the quality content that they started to co-produce and publish, it’s not something unachievable. They are pushing and changing the entertainment industry in Iran. It was something that I didn’t think Aparat could pull off against the power of official TV channels and satellite TV. And this portrays the company’s and their team capability. Not to mention the Iranian people watching these videos online regardless of the high internet price.

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