India is a big country with lots of families, but many of them don’t even have a TV. That’s really difficult for many of us to imagine but it is a brutal reality nonetheless.
Right now, there are about 182 million homes in India with TVs. But that’s not enough. There are around 100 million more homes. It’s a big challenge because some families can’t afford TVs, and in some places, it’s hard to set up TV services.
TV is a technology that became popular in India in the late 1980s. With the telecast of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the popularity of TV surged like nothing. But you know the gap that exists even today. What is the scene with the OTT now?
Quite evidently there is a rise of online streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. These are great for people in cities, but not everyone can afford them. Plus, the shows they offer often cater more to city folks. Yes, we do get stuff like Mirzapur quite often but yet again, they are very less in numbers. Shows like “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, “School Of Lies”, “Fabulous Lives Of Bollywood Wives” etc are meant only for the urban centres. This is true for a plethora of content we see on OTT. This means people in rural areas miss out on seeing stories that are like their own.
This is perhaps the biggest reason OTT platforms create content that relates more to the urban centres because the viewership comes from those areas. When this dynamics changes, so will that of content.