Should you get a ShemarooMe subscription?

Who doesn’t enjoy kicking back with a good movie or a show after a long day at work? But deciding what to watch has become increasingly difficult given the excessive options available across OTT channels. That’s why choosing the right OTT becomes very important. Catalogue size, number of recent releases, access to regional titles, option to stream live channels and subscription cost are just some of the factors to be considered. To help you make an informed decision, here’s our review of ShemarooMe.

ShemarooMe is... an Indian OTT founded in 2019 with a collection of movies, TV shows, live TV channels and popular songs in various Indian languages. They follow a “freemium” business model with some of the content being offered for free while some need a subscription to be streamed. ShemarooMe presently has a presence in 150 markets including the UK, the US, South Asian and Middle East markets.

Platforms supported: Android, iOS and Desktop

Download and Onboarding experience: The size of the Android app is 10 MB and the download and onboarding experience was smooth. Prior to onboarding, one had to select one’s preference of language.

Subscription Plan:

The subscription plans for ShemarooMe are as follows:

What to expect:

ShemarooMe has the following sections :

• Home
• Movies
• Shows
• Live
• Videos

The platform caters to the below languages:

• Hindi
• Gujarati
• Punjabi
• Marathi

The Home section has a carousel that shows some of the content that is currently trending. It has around 38 widgets with some of them being :

• Superhit Gujarati nataks
• Best of Malhar hits
• Akshay Kumar blockbusters
• Bollywood premiere
• Coming soon
• Most popular
• Originals
• Classic shorties
• Bollywood movies
• 24/7 Live news

The Movies section has a carousel as well. It has around 28 widgets with some of them being:

• Punjabi movies
• Movies in Hindi
• Marathi cinema hits
• South dhamaka
• Best of comedy movies

The Shows section is again divided into a carousel and widgets. There are around 10 widgets with some of them being:

• Kids shows in Hindi
• Marathi shows
• Originals
• Gujarati shows

The home, movies and shows sections contain both free and premium titles with the latter tagged as “premium”.

The Live section has a carousel and three widgets:

• Live darshan
• 24/7 Live news
• All channels

The Videos section has carousel and around nine widgets:

• Punjabi songs
• Gujarati songs
• Classic shorties
• Jukebox
• Filmi gaane

Design and experience:

The design is simple and not cluttered and the platform is divided into various widgets. This makes it easier for a user to search for content from the widget of their choice. The See All option for the widgets helps the user discover more content from any particular widget.

Movie Detail Page has the following elements:

• Video
• Genre
• Language
• Certification
• Runtime
• Add to watchlist
• Share
• Download
• Synopsis
• Cast
• Crew
• Similar movies

The video allows one to forward or rewind by 10s, making it easy to skip credits or replay a scene.

The show detail page has a listing of episodes as well.

The live video page has the below aspects:

• Video
• Ads
• Location of the video
• Date of video
• Audio language
• Share
• Synopsis
• Similar videos

Recommendation Engine:

The platform doesn’t account for the users’ preferences and there is no recommendation engine to suggest any movies, shows, live content or songs to a user based on their preference or watching history.

• Trending and popular searches section is available only when a user clicks on the search bar
• A user can search for a movie, show, video or even a play
• The search displays relevant results. Eg: When title “Gone kesh” was keyed in, the first title that appeared was a relevant result

Sign in/Sign up:

One can sign in or sign up at any point using:

• Phone number and OTP
• Facebook, Google or personal email

Pros & Cons:

Pros

1. The platform has sections that are divided into widgets which make it easier for users to find content of their choice
2. There is a wide variety of content to choose from the 4 languages it caters to, but it surely has more Gujarati titles than others (the channel has 500+ Gujarati films, shows and nataks)
3. There are various subscription tiers that a user can choose from based on language and type of content
4. The platform allows users to download movies, TV shows and videos to watch when offline

Cons

1. The platform has no filters for language, genre, year of release etc which makes it difficult for a user to filter content based on their preference
2. The platform has no recommendation system in place, thus making relevant content discovery a challenge
3. The platform only has four languages and English is not available which could have boosted and diversified its catalogue
4. The catalogue is not updated as it does not have many latest releases. However, Swagatam, the first Gujarati film to ever have a digital first release on May 20, released on this platform

Suggestion for the platform:

1. The platform needs to introduce filters for language and genre so that users can choose what they want to watch from the catalogue
2. They can add IMDb rating to the movie and show detail page so that users can make an informed decision about selecting a show/movie to watch
3. The catalogue needs to be updated with latest releases if they want to attract more users onto their platform

Why should one subscribe?

1. The platform has various tiers of subscription hence the users are only paying for what they really want to watch
2. The OTT has a lot of old movies and shows that one could be interested to watch and some of these may not be available on other OTT platforms.

Rating:

I would rate the platform a 7 out of 10 based on the pros and cons listed out above.

Having a ShemarooMe subscription is recommended for those who want to watch movies and shows in regional languages . It’s for those users who wish to pay for a subscription that would let them watch content that they are interested in. ShemarooMe also caters to users who are searching for free content to stream.