Tamil rhymes help YouTube catch them young

The company’s speciality is distilling traditional Tamil stories, folk tales and legends into rhymes suitable for pre-schoolers and young viewers. It has also forged tie ups with Amazon Prime in international markets for the content distribution.

R Sathish Guptha, Director, of the company says, “Our company’s mainstay is creating Tamil content for children. Our journey started almost 8 years ago when I began looking for traditional Tamil rhymes and stories for my child. And I realised there was nothing online that fit the bill. Today, we have a compilation of more than 200 traditional rhymes, tailor-made for children on our YouTube channel. Inspired by Tirukkural and Aathichudi Kathaigal (stories), and Bharathiyar’s songs, we are creating an entire array of exclusive Tamil content for younger audiences.”

The channel has as many as 1,500 plus Tamil videos, which is part of the 3,500 plus edutainment videos in various regional languages, all of which are made in-house by a 30-member team. “We are also creating content for foreign countries, such as German and Philippines. Currently we are working with Amazon Prime in UK, Germany and Japan to supply them content specific to those regions,” says Guptha.

Owing to the edutainment nature of the content, the channel has the benefit of repeat viewing among its young audiences. He adds, “Google has also acknowledged us as a high-volume channel and is helping us with the SEO based hits. We are currently in the R&D phase for incorporating AI support for our content, via Amazon Alexa and Google Home, the latter of which is successfully showcasing our stories. Apart from this, the company is coming out with an exclusive web series called Charlie and Friends. In January, we plan on coming up with two other web series based on world folk tales and stories from Tamil Nadu.”

Cumulatively, an investment of Rs 50 cr has gone into the company, which is looking forward to conducting video workshops directly with schools in Tamil Nadu.