Small OTT firms snap up regional films as foreign peers go slow

The content side has heated up significantly in the past three to four years, so volumes and costs have increased a lot

- Lata Jha

Regional-language video streaming platforms have tried to take advantage of bigger foreign players going slow on movie acquisitions and production of original content over the past few months. As Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema waited for the merger of the media units of their parent companies to go through, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video began to focus only on the acquisition of big-star films and approved fewer big-ticket shows.

This enabled ShemarooMe, Chaupal, Ultra Jhakaas, hoichoi and other regional language services to look at buying smaller-scale regional films or collaborate with non-mainstream names for series launches at regular intervals.