ZEE5 Turns Its Back Catalogue Into A Swipe Feed
ZEE5 has built Clips with Google Cloud, an AI-made vertical short-video feed cut from its own long-form catalogue. The platform says it has generated 13,000 clips from 1,200 titles so far.
- What it does: identifies high-engagement moments inside long-form titles and converts them into short vertical videos automatically
- Built with: Gemini Pro, the Chirp multilingual model, the Cloud Vision API and deep learning models for image processing
- How it is used: a swipe-led feed where a clip that catches a viewer leads straight into the full-length title
- Output so far: 13,000 clips from 1,200 titles
- Early signal claimed: viewing behaviour moving from Clips into full-length content
- Who built it: the ZEE5 and Google Cloud teams together
Why ZEE5 Is Mining Its Own Shelf
Because the catalogue is already paid for. Commissioning short-form to feed a discovery surface means a second content budget; cutting it out of titles that already exist means the marginal cost of a clip is compute.
The harder problem it solves is the cold open. A streaming home page asks a viewer to commit to a two-hour film on the strength of a poster, and a swipe feed replaces that bet with a sample, which is closer to how anyone actually decides what to watch now.
What It Changes For Media Buyers
The inventory shape. A vertical feed inside a streaming app creates short, skippable, sound-off placements where the platform previously had pre-roll and mid-roll against long-form, and those behave far more like social than like television.
It also changes the measurement question being asked. If the stated purpose of Clips is to move someone into a full title, the number that matters is the handoff rate, not the view, and that is a metric a buyer should be asking to see before it is sold against.
What Was Said
Tejkarran Singh Bajaj, business head for ZEE5 India and AI and innovation, said the ability to turn thousands of hours of existing content into fresh entry points at scale is what makes it interesting. Pramod Prakash, chief technology officer at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, said Clips was built around making it easier for viewers to find stories they did not actively search for. Amit Kumar, managing director of digital natives business at Google Cloud India, called it an example of generative AI driving measurable business value at scale.