Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, there were two OTT players in India— Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. For a subscription fee, they let you watch a lot of movies and TV shows from around the globe.
Soon, half a dozen more joined them and brought more content to your smartphones and TVs. This time, a couple of local languages were added to the mix. Now, five years after Netflix entered India and Reliance Jio introduced cheap data plans, India is home to 40-odd significant OTT players. A dozen or more among them are entirely homegrown regional players, which let you stream content exclusively in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Odia, and more across a dizzying array of formats—movies, TV shows, web series, reality shows, originals, catch-up content, and shorts. They are all vying for the wallets and viewership of a fast-digitizing regional audience.
“India speaks various languages. Among those, there are 10 languages, which are spoken by 50-100 million-plus people on a global scale. Each of them can support an OTT platform… We should look at how to entertain households from different languages because they are underserved today,” says SVF-promoted hoichoi’s CoFounder Vishnu Mohta.
Actor Allu Arjun-backed Telugu OTT platform aha’s CEO Ajit Thakur says language was always a differentiator in entertainment. “In the OTT era, where the need for personalized entertainment has grown compared to broadcasting, one way of personalising is giving you content in your language.”
This story is from the November 14, 2021 edition of Business Today.
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This story is from the November 14, 2021 edition of Business Today.
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