Bioscope: A bridge between good content and viewers

As the heydays of cable TV are waning, streaming services around the world are beginning to peak. Bioscope, one of the leading local streaming services in Bangladesh, is also playing a predominating role in spearheading its presence.

Bioscope, a concern of Grameenphone, launched its beta version in 2016.

"Bioscope is acting as a bridge between the content industry and the Bangladeshi viewers who are in many cases deprived of a proper medium to watch quality content," said Solaiman Alam, chief digital & strategy officer of Grameenphone.

"Bioscope particularly has an agenda to serve Bengali contents for all 300 million Bengali speaking diaspora worldwide," he added.

Bioscope has a wide array of content featuring Bangladeshi movies, live TV, live sports and TV shows. Besides, the platform is also collaborating with local producers to make original shows.

Almost 70 percent of the content available on Bioscope is absolutely free for everyone. Prime contents are accessible for prime pack purchasers. There are multiple prime packs bundled with data.

The most popular ones are 30-day prime pass with five GB Bioscope internet for Tk49 and three-day prime pass with 30MB Bioscope internet for Tk9. As of now, Bioscope has approximately two lakh daily users. So far, seven million subscribers have registered in the web and app version of Bioscope.

"Our target is to reach out to all the Bengali speaking community of the world by 2022," said Zaki Md Adnan, growth, content and marketing lead at Bioscope.

When asked about Bioscope's business model, Adnan said, "Our business model is very straight forward. We sell prime packs for prime contents."

Apart from serving streaming content, bioscope is also determined to explore other avenues of entertainment. Besides original content, Bioscope also wants to distribute partnered content of the likes of iflix and Zee5.

"Live TV is one of our key USPs and our users love watching TV on Bioscope," said Adnan, adding, "We want to get all the local live TV channels and the popular international channels onboard in 2020."

Bioscope also aims to become the go-to destination for Bangladeshi movies.

Talking about their own ventures, Adnan said, "We are super excited about Bioscope Originals. 2020 will see a lot of interesting romcoms, thrillers and true-crime originals only on Bioscope.

"Utshober Raat," based on the legendary writer Samaresh Majumdar's short story, is set to premiere on Bioscope in 2020. It will be the platform's first original series in this year.

Adnan seems rather optimistic about the future of Bangladeshi streaming content.

"Support local artistry by streaming Bangladeshi content on Bioscope," he conveyed to the audience.