The Hard Landing of Ullu's Soft-Core Pack

Vibhu Agarwal built the streaming app into a ₹100 crore business; it's all over for now

- Soumya Gupta

Six years ago, an unassuming businessman from Lucknow hosted a glittery launch party in Mumbai, surrounded by beautiful, well-dressed actors and actresses, loud reporters, and flashing cameras. With bright yellow 'U's—the first alphabet of the Ullu app—displayed on massive boards in the back, Vibhu Agarwal attempted to explain how he came upon such an unusual name for his new streaming service.

Agarwal thought for a bit and then said in Hindi: "I had developed a fever, wondering what name to give. I wanted a word that people recognise and use in their daily lives. Anyone who is awake late into the night binge watching shows, we call him 'ullu', no?"

Ullu in English is owl—nocturnal birds with a carnivorous diet.

In India's popular imagination, the Ullu app has come to stand for another thing—high quality soft-core entertainment. So much so that last month, the ministry of information and broadcasting banned the platform, along with over 20 others, for streaming sexually explicit content.

An appendix to the order, 90 pages long, and informally circulated, laid out in great detail the rationale for the ban. Along with screenshots from streaming shows as evidence, the appendix outlines the runtime of the shows, the sexual content timeline, the total sexual content length, and a host of remarks for every show.

Sample this: "The content is aimed to provoke sexual desires rather than inform or educate"; "the content appeals to base and morbid interests, and has the potential to harm and corrupt the audience"; "there is hardly any storyline. Some sort of pretentious 'story' is created which cannot be termed as a story even in a loose sense of the word".