India has upwards of 450 million unique streaming viewers a month, 58 million paying SVOD subs, and a burgeoning community of OTT players serving regional language audiences. Vanita Kohli-Khandekar looks at the next generation of operators discovering their voices online.
 

Fissa is about ACP Ranjan’s investigation of a murder that has a strange connection with fish. The Assamese series, along with others, has drawn 90,000 downloads on Reeldrama. Of these, about 8,000 people pay anywhere from Rs299/US$4 (for three months) to Rs900/US$12 (for a year) to watch films and shows such as Fissa or Paak Ghar, a cookery show on Assamese cuisine. Those are nice numbers for a streaming app that is barely six months old and in a language that just over 15 million Indians speak.

Reeldrama is, along with Olly Plus (Odia), Aha (Telugu), The Stage (Haryanvi), Hoichoi (Bengali), Planet Marathi, Koode (Malayalam) or Oho Gujarati, among the dozens of new streaming apps rushing to fill the gaping hole in language offerings online. 

“We routinely get e-mails and messages on social media - of appreciation or because people want more content,” says Kuheli Dasgupta, director, Reeldrama. which has plans to offer more shows and films from other states like Tripura and Manipur. 

Scrolling down the list of India’s 60+ streaming video apps, the country’s diversity is on full display. 

As the market for online drama and series booms, “proliferation (of languages) was bound to happen,” says Vishnu Mohta, executive director, SVF, and co-founder of Hoichoi. 

The number of unique visitors to streaming platforms rose from 277 million in 2018, to over 454 million in February 2021, according to Comscore India data. 

Over the same period, revenues almost doubled from US$769 million to US$1.45 billion, says Media Partners Asia (MPA). 

The surprise has been the growth in subscription – India now has 58 million paying OTT subs.

If you wonder why the biggies – Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ Hotstar – are missing from this party; they aren’t. Some, such as Amazon Prime Video and Zee5, have been investing in languages other than Hindi. Others like Netflix have been slow to join. Its first non-Hindi film, Firebrand (Marathi) came in 2019, more than three years after it entered India. 

“Two years back we started pitching concepts in Malayalam to platforms but unfortunately the language was not on anyone’s radar. Many of the creators were unhappy about not getting access to a platform. So we identified some and are now working with them,” says Radhakrishnan Ramachandran, founder and CEO of Studio Mojo on why he set up Koode late in 2020. 

Since the larger platforms aim for maximum reach, their ability to get into dialects, genres or local issues with some degree of depth does not always match that of single language OTTs such as Koode or Niri9 (Assamese). 

“The reason you watch Danish or Icelandic shows is because of their nativity. If we do a show based on Kanyakumari, it will be really based in Kanyakumari. It will be relevant to the soil, the dialect. The Tirunelveli dialect is different from the Chennai dialect and from others in Tamil Nadu. It is this authenticity that makes it (different language offerings) sustainable,” says B. Srinivasan, managing director, Ananda Vikatan Group. 

Vikatan had been making shows (Thirumathi Selvam and Kolangal) for Sun TV for over two decades. In 2020 it went digital with daily show Vallamai Tharayo on YouTube, picked up and dubbed by ETV (Telugu) and Flowers TV (Malayalam). 

Meanwhile Disney+ Hotstar, which Vikatan had approached four years ago, commissioned November Story, about a celebrated crime novelist with Alzheimer’s found at a murder scene with no memory of what happened. His daughter’s attempt to unravel the truth got a phenomenal rating of 8 on IMDB.

Much of this deep localising is reminiscent of broadcast television. The first moves to offer programming in languages other than Hindi came from local entrepreneurs like Kalanithi Maran (Sun TV, Tamil, 1993) or Ramoji Rao (Eenadu TV, Telugu, 1995). Later Zee, Star and Viacom18 entered the game. 

Some, such as Zee, built organically. Others bought out local entrepreneurs. Star, for instance, acquired Asianet in 2008 and Maa TV in 2015 to build its non-Hindi business. 

This forced the biggies to up their game. 

“Given the number of languages India has, the option for one language OTT always exists. The questions are around long-term economics and the evolution of the local content ecosystem to support that growth,” says Vijay Subramaniam, Amazon Prime Video’s director and content head. Amazon Prime Video offers eight Indian languages and has been aggressively building its non-Hindi library.

He has a point. Dasgupta talks about the issues with acquiring shows and films from Manipur, Tripura and other states. So do other OTTs and broadcasters. The production ecosystem in many languages, such as Odia or Punjabi, is not robust like it is in Hindi or Tamil. There aren’t enough line producers, technicians, writers and crew members. As more OTTs rush in, the situation will remain difficult until an ecosystem develops. 

For now, audience numbers for regional-language streaming platforms are small, with none on any top 10 lists. But they can’t be ruled out. 

As past video entertainment environments in India have showed, regional languages have the power to rise up and dominate.

Published in ContentAsia's September 2021 magazine