The advantage of OTT over theaters is that viewers are spoilt for choice; there is competition amongst OTT platforms for subscribers but individually the content that they all put out doesn’t compete or clash with each other because viewers can simply watch all the films for no additional cost to them.
The lack of transparency from streaming sites is a big issue. Since none of them reveal the viewership data or the growth in subscriber count achieved by them it becomes difficult to pit these movies against each other and reduces the pressure from the films to deliver a certain figure in the opening weekend.
Another aspect is that in theaters the box office collections are the metric of success of a film whereas on OTT the only metric is the audience verdict. The films only have the backing of its storyline and actors’ performance in the film. So an accurate question is not which film will be the most successful but which film will be the most enjoyable out of all.
One way for producers or creators to know how the film fares on OTT is if the pay-per-view model is applied on digital releases which will allow for easy tracking of sales and show the reach of the film. This could also help level the playing field between the small and big budget films online and make them more commercially viable.
But for now, we shall wait and watch the verdict for these 4 entertainers streaming on Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar and ZEE5. Meanwhile tell us which film you’ll be catching first out of the lot, come July 31st, in the comments below!