Everybody is talking about Netflix. The OTT (over-the-top: video, television and other services provided over the Internet rather than traditional service providers) giant made its India debut a week ago and since then, everybody and their grandmother has discussed ad nauseum whether or not it will work in the Indian market.
While that is a question that the stats will answer, one thing is sure. There has been a marked and definite shift from television to Internet in terms of how you source your entertainment. And it’s been brewing for nearly half a decade now. Says Arunabh Kumar, Founder and Creative Experiment Officer, The Viral Fever Media Labs, “When I would go to different colleges in 2010 or 2011, I’d do this little experiment – I’d ask people what their last TV memory was and the only answer I would get would be either a sports match or the news. Never a fiction programme. Maybe a one-off ‘Roadies’. That’s when I figured that people had stopped watching TV. They may or may not have started downloading and watching stuff online but the 18-34 age group was completely ignoring the broadcast medium.” Kumar was canny enough to catch on and began The Viral Fever (TVF), calling it an online television network.
The average Indian today consumes entertainment online. In fact, digital video is a growing market attracting ever-higher media spends each year. “The numbers are staggering and too big to ignore. Digital video has changed the way people consume audio-visual content, beginning with disruptive business models like YouTube and long gurney ads, OTT platforms like Netflix, Hotstar, etc.,” says Vishal Jacob, National Director, Digital, Maxus India. “The entertainment world has already moved towards a hyper-connected, Internet-based digital distribution model, with content delivered on demand for consumers on the screen of their choice.”
This is the model that Netflix is taking advantage of by being “focused on making our service better — better personalisation, better streaming, better movies and TV shows. It’s up to us to win the moments when people decide what to do with their time,” a Netflix spokesperson tells me.
While right now the biggest peeve of Indian Netflix users is that there are very, very limited titles, Netflix is planning to “add more as the service grows in popularity and we better understand what our members want to watch in each region. In 2016, we plan to spend about US$5B on programming rights, including many titles that will be exclusive to Netflix around the world.”
A king’s ransom, that. However, one doesn’t have to depend on Netflix to analyse the Indian market and then create local content. We’ve got home-grown world-class entertainment already, thank you very much. TVF’s web series ‘Pitchers’ is ranked #23 with a 9.6 rating on IMDB’s Top-Rated TV list, beating all but one (‘Making of a Murderer’) on Netflix’s original content list hollow. ‘Permanent Roommates’ (to make its Season 2 debut on Valentine’s Day, reveals Kumar to us exclusively), also a TVF original web series, is the only other Indian TV series to be listed on the IMDB Top-Rated TV list.
The offerings are varied. You’ve got web series, stand-up comedy, sketches, even a news comedy show (‘On Air with AIB’), short films (Ahalya, Nayantara’s Necklace), even entire films masquerading as web series by being shown in 15- or 20-minute episodes (‘It’s A Man’s World’, ‘Bang Baaja Baaraat’). And apparently, the makers of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ are interested in remaking ‘It’s A Man’s World’ for U.S. television.
Ashish Patil, head of Y Films, talks of the importance of creating exclusive web content rather than more candid camera, vox pop or sketch shows. “An average of 100 hours of footage is uploaded every minute on YouTube every day,” he says. So a script written for the web has to be very different from a generic movie script.
While Kumar may have sown the seeds of the revolution accidentally by creating ‘Rowdies’ (the first ever original Indian content to go viral) because he felt like it, the Net as medium of entertainment is no longer the step-sibling it once was. Mainstream production houses are jumping into the fray (Y Films belongs to Yash Raj Films and both its web series featured mainstream Bollywood biggies like Parineeti Chopra, Kalki Koechlin, Bhumi Pednekar, Ali Fazal, Rajit Kapur, et al). Bollywood stars now make guest appearances online (Shahrukh Kan and Kajol in TVF’s ‘Bhaag Jeetu Bhaag’, Alia Bhatt and Irrfan Khan in All India Bakchod’s ‘Genius of the Year’ and ‘Every Bollywood Party Song Ever’, and of course Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor and Karan Johar in the infamous comedy roast ‘AIB Knockout’).
Thus, when ‘It’s A Man’s World’ debuted, as Patil points out, it would not received that big a viewership had the big names not been on board. Today, his Y Films channel has 229,759 subscribers on YouTube.
Comedy is one genre that’s seen a huge upsurge thanks to this shift. Sorabh Pant, founder of East India Comedy, figures there has been a massive 300-400 per cent increase in the size of his audience. “And it is spread all over the country. In the last year, I have done probably 13 new cities, most of them cities you wouldn’t think you could do stand-up in, and the only reason that happened was because of our online presence,” he says.
One would think, given general consumption patterns in Indian, that most of this so-called trend is urban. Not so, says Pant. Almost all the 13 cities he went to were Tier 2 cities. “Places like Jamshedpur, Nagpur, Raipur, Guwahati, Shillong and odder ones like Mangalore — it was awesome.” Pant also says he doesn’t think young Indians watch TV at all. “Every time I talk to college-goers, 99 per cent of the time they’ll name some four YouTube people I have never heard of. They don’t bother watching stuff like ‘Meri Saas Ke Sapne’ or whatever. So my point is, consumption patterns have completely changed; it’s a global trend. I don’t know if you’ve heard of PewDewPie.” I say I have and am promptly told, “I doubt anyone over 25 has any idea who the guy is unless you’re involved in the industry because it’s a young person’s game. We’ve noticed that the ages of people who attend our shows has significantly lowered, from 29-33 to 19-21. Youngsters globally are only consuming entertainment online.”
Kumar is also clear that now he wouldn’t want to make anything for television even if he got a chance. His audience is online. “Our episodes get a viewership of over three million each — the kind of viewership you get for a TV show with a TRP of 3 or 4. I think what we have managed in terms of scale, with content being the real king here, is getting the kind of viewership that even top TV shows cannot get.”
So now that there’s Hotstar, Netflix, Y Films, and a whole host of other online channels, is competition heating up?
Says Kumar, “I see Netflix as an opportunity; tomorrow we might want to partner with them. That gives us a chance to be a part of a larger ecosystem. At this time it’s too nascent… We need a lot more content companies before we even think of competition.”
Patil agrees, “I see Netflix as a platform that will help the market grow. The fact that Indian viewers are ready to pay for good content is heartening. So the business model can start making sense finally. Plus, they would be great as distribution partners. Now, perhaps we can debut movies online first.”
But will viewers pay? “For good content, absolutely,” says Charles Fernandes, a 27-year-old Goan who works in Astra Zeneca. “Netflix may have only around 700 shows compared to 5000+ in the U.S. and crappy bandwidth, but if all that improves, I’m willing to pay to watch what I want on my daily commute.”
There have been media reports of broadcasters going on record to say they don’t think there will be any direct impact on their viewership because “TV and OTT are two different ecosystems. TV is appointment viewing, while OTT is on demand, and it will take three or four years for consumption and behaviour patterns to change.” But the truth is that even in 2013, industry watchers had predicted major changes thanks to >advertisers accelerating the shift from TV to digital .
Censorship is another area where the Internet absolutely wins over traditional broadcast. While all content on TV is sanitised (with the exception of a few late night shows), because #IndianSanskaar, the Internet is still fairly unregulated. So we’ve got stand-up comedians cussing, liberal showings of the finger, we’ve got an AIB not bothering to bleep out the F word on Hotstar, and we’ve got uncensored lip locks between Ali Fazal and Angira Dhar in Y Films’ ‘Bang Baaja Baaraat’.
Clearly, due to a number of factors, the trend has shifted quickly from not watching TV at all to illegally torrenting a beloved TV series to creating original content tailored for Indian audiences. It’s not just content, though. Online channels create their own stars who also go viral. They might not get mobbed in the mall but they do get verified Twitter handles. “You’re right, that’s a bigger triumph,” says Kumar. “If tomorrow people want to see a TVF film, they want to see a Jeetu or a Sumit or a Naveen in it, not another Bollywood guy... I met Raju Hirani once and he said he loved ‘Tech Conversations with My Dad’. When someone you idolise says that to you, nothing is a bigger compliment.” And as we all know, the higher your number of Twitter followers, the bigger fish you are. Who needs the mall mob?
