Storytellers ride the OTT boom to feed growing demand for streaming video

An eclectic bunch of content factories have emerged to feed growing demand for streaming video

Raghav Subbu’s Kota Factory begins with 16-year-old Vaibhav’s journey from Itarsi to Kota. His struggle and that of thousands of young Indians to crack the entrance tests to either the Indian Institutes of Technology or medical school is told in black and white. Season one of Kota Factory, funded by Unacademy and made by TVF, launched on YouTube in April 2019. The first episode hit 60 million viewers: all five episodes averaged 35 million. Not surprisingly, Netflix picked up the second and (upcoming) third season, too. Kota Factory and Panchayat (Amazon Prime Video) are among the top 20 OTT shows in India (in the year they were released) going by Ormax Media data. Of the 11 Indian shows on IMDB’s global list of 250 top rated TV shows, seven are from TVF.
 
Tigmanshu Dhulia’s procedural crime drama, Criminal Justice (Disney+ Hotstar), an Applause-BBC Studios Indian adaptation of the same BBC show, has been among the most watched on OTT through its three seasons. Add Luther (Rudra), Dr. Foster (Out of Love) both on Disney+ Hotstar among the half a dozen formats from BBC Studios that have made it to the top 20 list.
 
Aditya Birla group’s Applause Entertainment has had a dream run so far with shows like Hello Mini (MX Player) and Mind the Malhotras (Disney+ Hotstar) out of a total of 41 in four years. Scam 1992 (SonyLIV), based on Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu’s book on the Harshad Mehta scam, has been its biggest hit. It helped SonyLIV gain millions of new subscribers to become India’s second largest pay OTT after Disney+ Hotstar.

 
Welcome to the content creator party.
 
As 80 OTTs jostle to grab a share of one of the world’s fastest growing streaming video markets, they are literally throwing money at “content”. Media Partners Asia (MPA) estimates that OTT content spends have risen almost six times from Rs 1,690 crore in 2017 just before the boom began to Rs 9,840 crore by the end of 2022. Their bid? To get to a chunk of the 468 million Indians watching streaming video. More than 122 million now subscribe to an OTT. From 2018, when the boom began, the business has grown from almost nothing to over Rs 17,000 crore in ad and pay revenue.
 
TVF, BBC Studios and Applause are among the handful of studios that are riding this boom well. All of them feature prominently in any list of the top 20-30 shows. “TVF continues to have a great success rate, with more than 75 per cent of their shows performing above the average viewership on whichever platform they are on,” says Shailesh Kapoor, CEO, Ormax Media.
 
To be fair, there are many outstanding content houses. There are Raj (Nidimoru) and (Krishna) D K’s D2R Films. It created The Family Man (Amazon Prime Video), a superbly written peek into the everyday life of an intelligence officer. There is Richie Mehta’s (Poor Man’s Productions) Delhi Crime, which won India its first International Emmy in 2020. Prakash Jha’s Aashram (MX Player) is a huge hit with an audience topping 35 million even in season 3. There is Banijay Asia (Hostages, Call My Agent) and Pritish Nandy Communications (Four More Shots Please!) among others. Except for Banijay, most haven’t moved beyond one or two shows.
 
“We work in a hub and spoke model. We did Scam 1992 with Hansal Mehta, Tanaav with Sudhir Mishra, Rudra with Ajay Devgn. We are designed to work with all kinds of creative people. It allows us to scale,” says Sameer Nair, CEO, Applause.
 
That is the first and most important difference between the handful that have grown and the others. Arunabh Kumar, founder and now mentor at TVF, reckons that “diversity of ideas” is what has worked for the studio that has made 31 shows in the last three years. In 2010, TVF began with shows like Permanent Roommates and TVF Pitchers as an online alternative for young people not interested in TV. Their success attracted funding. Over 12 years, TVF has gathered a huge fan following on YouTube, which has become its audition theatre for ad-funded experiments such as Kota Factory, TVF Aspirants or Tripling, all of which went mainstream after a first season on YouTube. “The most creative person can only do one story. The larger number of voices we have institutionalised brings this diversity,” says Kumar. It has a 100-odd people working across different video formats and a group of seven that takes a call on any idea.
 
“When the (OTT) boom started (in 2018) there was pressure on turnaround time. BBC Studios had formats ready,” says Sameer Gogate, general manager, BBC Studios India. Most of its shows, adapted across the world, are well-written with clear characters. Adapting them takes just 7-9 months, against 12-18 months that developing a series from scratch would take. “The original source material is very high quality and there is a cultural/sensitivity match between India and UK,” says Gogate. Dr Foster is about adultery, Luther about a super-cop; both themes are easily translatable in the Indian context. That is the second thing that worked for this bunch. They could react to the demands coming from a growing number of OTTs and ramp up quickly.
 
This leads to challenges. Most of the big OTTs — Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or MX Player — have the tiniest details on viewership. How much of this back-end data is shared with creators, however, is moot. In the absence of a third-party metric like, say, ratings for TV, measuring success and gauging trends are difficult. “It is a tricky space for content creators,” says Vijay Koshy, president, TVF. There are several indicators. “If there is a season 2 it tells me that the show has worked. Completion rate — the number of viewers who finish a series — is the other metric. Ideally, it should be 70-80 per cent,” says Gogate.
 
“We get a lot of data on what is working globally. For example, currently there is fatigue on crime globally and that is travelling to India. Last year clients were over-indexed on female protagonist shows,” says Gogate. Usually it takes 6-12 months for a wave to ride out. But a studio has to be ready for shows with whatever the next wave may be. “Content was largely limited to the thriller genre till 2019-20, plus a few shows from TVF in the comedy/romcom space. But the last two years have seen a lot of variety, with multiple genres such as comedy, drama and romance opening up,” says Kapoor.
 
The other issue is talent. “It has gone from best technicians, actors, directors not having work to the worst getting work, too. This has led to a lack of commitment. If season one works, they don’t want to give preference to season two. They want to do something different,” says Kumar. Usually that “something” is films that are “higher on the content caste system”, says Kumar. A film has a beginning, middle and an end. In a series every episode has a beginning, middle and an end. Making one therefore is a “gruesome and gruelling process. However, people are ready to do C grade films rather than doing an A grade show”, says Kumar.
 
This was probably true of broadcasting 25 years ago before discipline set it. The business of making stories for OTT then needs the discipline of broadcast with the creativity of film. That is a tough ask in an as yet evolving market.