OTT is hotting up

Flipkart is getting ready to take on video-streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hotstar. What does it mean to filmmakers?

Flipkart is all set to enter the online video streaming business. It is taking on Prime Video, run by e-commerce rival Amazon, and a host of other OTT channels.

Reports say Flipkart’s video-streaming service is going to be free, curated and personalised. Over-The-Top (OTT) media in India is booming. You only need to look around at people staring at their phones — all the time, in all places — to realise just how much.

There are at least 30 players in the space in India, ranging from behemoths like Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube, to homegrown outfits such as Hotstar, Eros Now, AltBalaji and Voot.
What does OTT’s phenomenal growth and the Indian consumer’s appetite for video mean for traditional filmmaking?

“It is a proud thing to screen my movie on an OTT platform like Netflix,” says Zakariya Mohammed, whose widely acclaimed film ‘Sudani from Nigeria’ was picked up by Netflix and won multiple National awards. Sudani’s Netflix listing also served a practical purpose — Zakariya had a link ready at hand to show industry biggies he met at film festivals.

Critical successes

Kannada filmmaker Mansore’s ‘Naathicharami’ and Aijaz Khan’s ‘Hamid’ had a similar trajectory: rave film circuit reviews, very modest theatrical run, picked up by Netflix, then winning multiple National Awards.

“Netflix was a big platform to reach the audience,” Mansore says, whose film has joined a select group of Kannada titles on the platform. Aijaz echoes the sentiment. “There was a time
when you could only watch these movies at film festivals… but the OTT audience is niche and wants to watch content-driven cinema,” he says. So OTT offers movies great reach and provide viewers with great variety. And the channels cover a lot of ground besides romcoms, sitcoms, and reality television: they are open to every conceivable genre, including food, real estate and adult animation.

Films once categorised as ‘B-Grade’or ‘Direct-to-DVD’now share pixel space with movies with artistic aspirations. AltBalaji slots some of its sleazier and cornier titles after a burnish of production, under ‘Exciting stories’ or ‘Crazy comedies’.

It is easy to be dismissive of this content, yet if a massive audience didn’t exist (with 23.7 million subscribers in AltBalaji alone), the platform wouldn’t churn them out at the rate it does.
With no money and resources, Shahnawaz Nellikunnil had an arduous three-year journey completing his movie ‘Candyflip’, a low-budget, experimental psychedelic thriller. Candyflip made the rounds of the movie circuit but was never screened at a theatre before it was taken up by Netflix.

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“The problem is that Netflix doesn’t promote your film and we don’t have money to promote it… they just promote their originals,” says Shahnawaz. The other problem with OTT platforms — one that Netflix and Amazon Prime are particularly notorious for — is the lack of transparency about how a title performs. “They never tell us about how many countries
the movie is streaming in, how many people have watched it. It’s like a black hole. Netflix doesn’t give statistics at all… even to the core team,” Shahnawaz says.

While it provides access, the deluge of content on OTT platforms effectively drowns out the voices of independent filmmakers. Questions about how their films are faring are met with vague answers — “enthusiastic response”, “trending in India for a while”— primarily because filmmakers themselves don’t know. Questions about hard numbers are met with a standard “You’ll need to speak to the production house”.

Another quibble that comes up is the absolute choice offered to consumers. A majority of Indian users of OTT platforms exclusively access content through smartphones, from ‘mobile-first to ‘mobile-only’. This is great for government spiel about ‘Digital India and fancy business talk about the ‘next billion users, but some questions apparently only trouble auteurs and hapless Humanities graduates.

Does ‘Video-on-Demand’ prevent sustained engagement with cinema? Where does this leave art? “The 70, 80-year-old cinema culture, without forward or back buttons, is on the way out. By the time CDs came in, people were skipping songs. Now people skip through the entire movie,” says Mansore, with a laugh.

“We shot the film for the big screen but the fact is that so many people from the field are watching movies on mobile phones. We can’t avoid that audience. It’s a sad thing, but the market is there,” says Zakariya Mohammed.

The compromise Zakariya can think of, to preserve ‘big-screen viewing’, is shifting to more intimate spaces like “Netflix theatres”, a couple of which have sprung up in India.

“All your life, one imagines one’s film is going to be seen on the big screen,” says Aijaz. “But one has to accept that OTT is a bigger audience than theatre is. At the end of the day, you are telling a story and that is what counts,” he says.

MONEY SPINNER

A KPMG report estimates that revenue from video streaming in India is Rs 163 billion this year, with a projected average growth of 30 per cent over the next five years. The money at stake has everyone salivating for a piece of the OTT pie.