With Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar all announcing the release of new South-Indian content on their streaming platforms this month, they have truly decided to tackle the vast Indian market (starting with South-India it seems). There is still a lot of work to be done when it comes to the rest of the country, but for now it looks like they have decided to target the most popular regional film industries – which looks to be Kollywood and Tollywood (Telugu and Tamil movie industries respectively. Mollywood and the Bengali film industry have also been targeted for creating new content.
When the above mentioned streaming platforms started in India, they just brought over a percentage of popular English content from their extensive library, with a few Bollywood and popular regional content added into the mix to attract “desi viewers”. They mainly stuck to Hindi and a few popular Tamil and Bengali features, as they had no idea how to navigate the Indian market, yet.
During that time, due to the popularity of OTTs around the country, Indian entrepreneurs decided to try their luck in the streaming business and some of them did well. MX Player, Voot, Zee5, Sony LIV, ALT Balaji are among the few who became successful in streaming multiple movies from various regional industries as well as Bollywood.
The international platforms noticed this and started first by calibrating their interface for the Indian audience, by creating Hindi, Bengali and Tamil interfaces. They slowly started creating Original Indian content but primarily stuck with either Bollywood or Indian shows and movies in English. During this time, Indian OTTs started producing more original content to get ahead of the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime and they have remained somewhat successful till date.
With Covid-19 happening, the international streaming services truly understood their power in India and have decided to create multiple original films and television series to compete with the Indian OTTs. They started by announcing multiple shows in Tamil and Telugu languages to kick things off as an announcement of their entry into the regional market.
Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ Hotstar all create brilliant content around the world, but they have understood the significance of the Indian market. As one of the largest consumers of entertainment in the world as their target, the streaming platforms have to calibrate their content for the Indian market, and these new upcoming content, should be just the tip of the iceberg. With this new “play”, the major OTT “conglomerates” have entered the regional market and time will tell if they can dish out good content as they have done so in other languages.
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