Now Streaming: Regional Rush

Betting on the power of local stories, content-hungry vernacular viewership, and india’s improving digital infrastructure, 15-odd regional video ott players are keen to win their slice of the growing streaming pie. And they are unfazed by the deep-pocketed giants in the business

- Vidya S

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.”