When this year’s International Emmy nominations were announced at the end of September, "Rocket Boys" was one of three Indian titles on the list of 56 shows that entered the final race.

“Who would have thought a premium drama about two scientists pursuing a nuclear dream would become one of the biggest shows in India,” Sony Liv’s content head, Saugata Mukherjee, says.

The nomination came a few days before Sony Liv announced its adaptation of premium scripted crime drama, "Magpie", as "Kan Khajura" (working title) in its third drama deal with Israel’s yes Studios after Indian versions of "Your Honour" and "Fauda".

There have, in the three years since Sony Liv launched, been a steady stream of high-profile premium series, including "Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story" and "Scam 2003: The Telgi Story", in addition to two seasons of "Rocket Boys", starring Jim Sarbh, who has been nominated for best actor in this year’s International Emmys. On the unscripted side, there are local versions of "Shark Tank" and "MasterChef India", which is being made in multiple languages, including Hindi, Telugu and Tamil. 

For Culver Max Entertainment (formerly Sony Pictures Networks India), and its three-year-old streaming platform Sony Liv, it’s “still early days”, for the platform and for original production, Mukherjee said during Media Partners Asia’s (MPA) APOS conference in Bali at the end of September. 

Having reconstituted production plans that “had to be thrown out the window” because of Covid, Mukherjee says Sony Liv is “very particular about telling stories that are deeply rooted … in the new India” and that reflect broader cultures beyond India’s metro centres.

“We had to think very differently at that time,” he says, not least because, as latecomers, they needed every differentiating factor they could muster. “We were mindful of the expense, and careful about the kinds of contained shows that we could make”.

Mukherjee says the platform is now “deeply focused on getting into regional programming… Growth for us will come from these markets”.

“A big part of my programming strategy over the past year and a half has been to over-index in language programming beyond Hindi… Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam and even Marathi,” he says. 

Streaming’s skew towards thrillers is also being tempered on Sony Liv.

Thrillers, Mukherjee says, are “easy to channel on streaming… They’re binge-worthy… we have refrained from doing too many of those because … we wanted to tell stories of empowerment, of women… deep rooted, Indian, culturally relevant stories”.

Unscripted, which he describes as a “sweet spot” with subscribers and advertisers, is a “big focus area”.

Mukherjee draws attention to the bigger picture in a country thought to be five years away from the pay-TV disruption elsewhere in the world. 

“Sony Liv is a network-led platform,” he says. “There is a plethora of content that is not always available on the SVOD side of the business.” 

“But the fact is that we have that feed… It’s very important because that’s where the subscriber/consumer, the audience, gets to know about the programmes we have on the [streaming] platform”. 

Looking ahead, he lists pricing and the ability to grow the premium production ecosystem as the major challenges facing SVOD platforms in India. 

“There is always a lot of content available but never enough to quench that thirst,” he says. 

Published in ContentAsia's eNewsletter, 9 October 2023