Okay, hear me out before you guys start raging at the unfairness of it all.
Along with Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam – Kannada is part of the “Big Four” regional South-Indian languages which has its own regional slangs & dialects and has a state full of people who speak it (All four languages mentioned before have this all). So why is Sandalwood (Kannada Film Industry) struggling to even put up a decent streaming platform, while the other three languages already have reputable streaming platforms of their own?
It is not like there are no Kannada films currently streaming on any OTTs. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ Hotstar has content from nearly every popular regional language they can get their hands on – which includes the aforementioned four South-Indian languages as well as Bengali, Marathi, etc. But with multiple local grown OTTs coming up, which are language specific (aiming at the language group), Sandalwood seems to be a little behind on this regard.
Bengali language specific OTT platform – Hoichoi dropped back in 2017, but gained national level prevalence this year (like any other fledgling OTT – due to the coronavirus pandemic). Aha Videos have been dropping Telugu films like crazy and are also dubbing other popular films into Telugu for their viewers to watch. The amount of Tamil OTT platforms out there is quite frankly, ridiculous. Planet Marathi is aimed at Marathi speakers (which launched this year) and Manorama Max is an online Malayalam platform which came about late last year. Even OTT platforms like Sun NXT are coming up aiming to target the South-Indian audience as a whole.
Kannada along with Tulu and Konkani content can be streamed on Talkies – which only focus on these three languages which is native to Karnataka. The thing is major OTT platforms know the importance of aiming at regional language speakers; Netflix Amazon Prime Video and Disney Hotstar are planning on spending more money together for original regional content next year than any of the home grown OTTs combined estimated input for the year 2021. But even they cannot cater to language specific audiences all the time. And that is where the magic of regional OTTs come in.
For the Kannadiga audience, besides Talkies, there is another mobile based streaming app targeted towards them called “Namma Flix”. The app has over 50 thousand downloads and decent reviews, so we are not going to knock it, but this is nothing compared to the popularity of the rest of the regional OTT streaming platforms. According to Talkies co-founder and head Nikhil Acharya, mainstream OTT platforms have yet to take an interest in Kannada content. But unless we see more proactive effort from Kannada filmmakers, we might not see any original Kannada content on OTTs for years. And after films K.G.F: Chapter 1 and Raajakumara, it would be a shame to not get some of that brilliance for original content to view on the digital screen.
So as you were or you may rage as you wish. Just pointing out that Sandalwood has been a bit slow in releasing original OTT content (which is still non-existent so far by the way).