Inside Zee5’s AI-driven tech overhaul for easier viewing

As streaming platforms compete for viewers across an increasingly crowded entertainment landscape, the challenge is no longer simply to offer more content. It is to help audiences find something relevant quickly, across devices, languages and formats, without making the experience feel complicated.

For Zee5, this has become a central technology and product challenge. The platform’s latest revamp has been driven by the need to simplify discovery, reduce the number of decisions viewers have to make and make the overall experience more responsive across mobile and Connected TV (CTV).

Pramod Prakash, CTO, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited says the company approached the revamp as an end-to-end exercise rather than a series of isolated changes to navigation, discovery or artwork.

“The real product challenge was not only about offering more choice but also about making that choice feel effortless for the user,” says Prakash.

The approach has resulted in changes across navigation, visual discovery, personalisation and the journey across Premium Entertainment, Free 5, KidZ, TV and Sports. Zee5 also undertook a broader audit of its product ecosystem and user journeys, with the aim of identifying friction points across platforms.

For Prakash, premiumisation is ultimately about making interactions “faster, more intuitive, responsive and dependable”, with technology remaining largely invisible to the viewer.

AI moves beyond recommendations

AI is increasingly becoming part of this technology stack, extending beyond conventional recommendation engines into content discovery, processing and customer experience.

On the product side, AI is being used to make recommendations, content rails and visual discovery more relevant by learning from how viewers engage with the platform. Short-form discovery through AI-powered Shorts adds another layer, allowing users to sample content before moving to longer-form movies and shows.

This becomes particularly relevant in India, where viewers can move between languages, genres, formats and screens during their entertainment journey.

“AI is becoming useful to us across the content and product lifecycle, but its real value lies in how effectively it can improve the viewer experience,” Prakash says.

The technology is also being applied behind the scenes to areas including video summaries, subtitling, voiceovers, content processing, creative generation and delivery.

Customer support is another emerging use case. Zee5 is developing an AI-powered support capability designed to help users with issues relating to subscriptions, playback, access, content and devices.

The broader objective is to use AI where it can reduce friction or improve accessibility and discovery, rather than introduce technology simply for its own sake.

Designing differently for Connected TV

The growth of CTV has added another dimension to the platform’s technology challenge. The interaction model on a large screen is fundamentally different from browsing on a mobile phone, where users can scroll, tap and navigate rapidly.

Zee5 therefore did not treat the television experience as an extension of its mobile interface.

“We have simplified navigation, reduced the number of remote-led actions and used the larger canvas more deliberately through richer artwork, previews and familiar experiences such as the programme guide for Live TV,” says Prakash.

The technology challenge is equally significant. The platform has to deliver a responsive and reliable experience across a wide range of television platforms, operating systems and device environments.

This has required extensive auditing and refinement of user journeys across the ecosystem, while personalisation is being used to maintain continuity as viewers move between mobile and CTV.

The goal is to combine the immersion of a large-screen experience with the simplicity that users increasingly expect from digital products.

Testing for India’s device diversity

One of the key lessons from the revamp has been that an OTT experience at scale is built through hundreds of small interactions rather than only through major features.

Zee5’s Bugathons brought together product, engineering, quality assurance and design teams to test complete user journeys across devices, operating systems and viewing environments, including older hardware. Stress-testing also reinforced the idea that premiumisation cannot be reduced to visual design.

Responsiveness, reliability, error handling, user control and consistency across platforms are equally important.

“Building for India requires designing for enormous device and usage diversity while ensuring the experience still feels simple and familiar to the viewer,” Prakash says.

This creates an architectural principle for the platform: complexity needs to be absorbed by the technology layer rather than passed on to the consumer.

For an OTT platform operating across different device capabilities, screen sizes, operating systems, languages and content formats, this is increasingly important. The underlying technology needs to adapt to those differences while the experience presented to the user remains consistent.

Balancing intent with discovery

The same philosophy is shaping how Zee5 approaches content discovery.

There are two distinct viewer behaviours to account for. One is the user who already knows what they want to watch and expects search and navigation to take them there quickly. The other is the viewer who is browsing without a specific title in mind.

The technology needs to support both.

If a viewer has a clear intent, search and navigation should minimise friction. During browsing, personalisation can use signals such as what the viewer watches, clicks on, skips or repeatedly ignores to identify potentially relevant content.

Clips adds another discovery mechanism by allowing users to sample moments from larger titles before moving into the full-length experience.

“The balance is between intent and discovery,” Prakash says.

The aim is not to place users into rigid recommendation categories but to make discovery responsive to changing interests across languages, genres and formats.

AI, in this context, becomes useful when it expands the viewer’s range of choices without making the process of choosing more complicated.

Building complexity into the platform, not the experience

The underlying technology architecture has to support this flexibility at scale.

For Zee5, building for India means dealing with complexity across languages, content formats, screen sizes, operating systems and device capabilities. But that complexity should not become visible in the user experience.

“Building for India means embracing complexity at the technology layer without allowing that complexity to surface in the user experience,” Prakash says.

This requires thinking about scale beyond infrastructure capacity. Every user journey and interaction supported by the platform has to remain adaptive and dependable as usage expands and the ecosystem becomes more fragmented.

AI can potentially simplify parts of this equation by helping the platform interpret behavioural signals more intelligently, improve discovery and automate elements of content processing and customer experience.

Over time, the larger opportunity is to make the platform increasingly responsive to individual viewers like anticipating needs, improving relevance and reducing friction, while keeping the experience itself straightforward.

Making customer support contextual

The same complexity appears in customer support. A streaming problem may relate to a subscription, playback, account access, a particular piece of content, a device or even language. Identifying a keyword is therefore not enough to resolve many issues.

Zee5’s AI-powered support assistant is being designed to understand the nature of a query and use relevant interaction context to guide straightforward issues towards faster resolution.

Where an issue is more complex, the system can hand the journey over to a human agent while carrying the context forward so that the customer does not have to repeat the problem.

The capability is being introduced progressively as Zee5 continues to refine the experience.

“The objective is not simply to automate support but to make it faster, more contextual and more seamless,” says Prakash.

From feature-led AI to an intelligent platform

The direction of Zee5’s technology strategy points towards a broader shift in OTT platforms. AI is no longer confined to a recommendation layer sitting on top of an otherwise conventional streaming platform. It is increasingly being incorporated into discovery, content processing, accessibility, customer support and the interpretation of user behaviour.

But the technology challenge remains one of managing complexity.

Zee5 has to make sense of diverse content, languages, devices and viewing behaviours without forcing viewers to understand the machinery underneath. Its product revamp therefore places emphasis not only on what new capabilities the platform can offer but also on how quietly those capabilities can operate.

For Prakash, that is ultimately what the technology layer needs to achieve: greater intelligence underneath, with less friction above it.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded into the platform, the differentiator may not simply be how many AI capabilities a streaming service deploys. It could be how effectively those capabilities make an increasingly complex entertainment ecosystem feel simple to the person sitting in front of the screen.