• Varmaa released legally on three platforms in India: The Ally, Shreyas Media and Shemaroo Entertainment, and the audience can watch it via pay-per-view. It is priced at ₹140. I logged onto The Ally through my laptop. Everything went smooth until I got a message on the landing page which said: “Anti Capture Service application not installed.”
  • From what I understand, it is an extension on Google Chrome which protects the screen from being recorded, and which I did install — this was after the payment gateway was successful. The website asked, or rather, forced me to download and install a third party application (AntiCaptureService) — which is free of cost — in order to access Varmaa . I was sceptical and fuming because a) it is a third party app, so there is no guarantee to your data being safe and b) I absolutely had zero interest. After installing the said app, I tried to refresh the page to a message that read: “Anti Capture Service detected capture program Radeonsettings.” The last time I checked, Radeon.exe was a driver for the graphic card.
  • If you are so concerned about your movie landing on a pirated website — which it did hours before its actual release — then why release at all on a streaming platform? Why would you arm twist the audience to install a third party app onto their systems for a movie which you, as a producer, scrapped it in the first place and later decided to monetise from it? I eventually watched the film on The Ally’s mobile application.