According to latest reports, while the Hindi speaking market is gradually and steadily moving away from pay-TV towards OTT, YouTube and more, the audience in the southern parts of India are still showing strong reliance on TV subscriptions mainly due to affordability factors and engaging content.
That brings up the question – are major OTT players in the country failing to tap into the massive potential of our diverse South Indian market?
While the regional OTT players are still in their growing phase and will need more time and budget to make some impact, streaming giants like Netflix, Prime Video, Jio Hotstar and more could gain significantly with a more aggressive strategy to cater to the needs of the audience in South India with focus on languages like Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.
These OTTs need to get more creative, source locally, develop new stories and characters rooted in their culture and not just rely on acquiring post theatrical rights for films from the region.
There have been far and few original South Indian shows like Suzhal, Poacher, Paruvu, 1000 Babies, Snakes and Ladder, etc. that made some wave and one cannot deny the conspicuous dearth of titles in the category.
While Prime Video and Jio Hotstar still showed some efforts it was until 2025 that Netflix realised what it was missing out on. In its latest slate for the year, Netflix announced a few of original series in the South Indian languages like ‘Test’, ‘Akka’, and ‘Super Subbu’.
There’s still a major gap that needs to be filled and while the chances for subscription prices are less likely to lower down the only other way to make OTTs more attractive in South India is to deliver in terms of quantity and quality and there’s no better time than now.
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