What’s up with OTT industry?

The lockdown—for lack of cinemas and fresh content on network TV—hastened the move to OTT among certain Indian audiences. Representation pic/ISTOCK

The party is over," is what I hear Bombay's producers, even the bigger ones, tell me, when casually asked, "How's it going?" What was this party, exactly?

Well, to start with you literally notice its absence in the evenings out, in Andheri West, Mumbai's showbiz capital, where after-work bars look relatively barren: "People don't have so much money anymore," I'm told.

It's also true that the pandemic permanently sucked the life out of most city's nights. You sense it everywhere. Mumbai, or Andheri, aren't exceptions.

What the pandemic unwittingly did for these parts, though, is provide unprecedented opportunities/employment, through a whole new industry.

That is, streaming services/OTT platforms. Netflix, for instance, dropped in India in January 2016, Hotstar in May 2016 and Amazon Prime Video in December 2016. Several Indian OTTs followed.

Guesstimates then suggested it would take about a decade for Indians to wholly adopt a new media/technology that was at once a theatre and a near-unlimited DVD library - the platform naturally allowing for unparalleled diversity in storytelling.

The lockdown - for lack of cinemas and fresh content on network TV - hastened that move to OTT, among certain audiences, into two years (2020-21) flat.

India is probably a rare market, where the majority accessed the Internet, through their cellphones (800 million plus) first, rather than the computer.

Everybody in a film industry, full of freelancers and start-up entrepreneurs, has scripts or a skill. The demand to produce software, given eyeballs, grew exponentially.

As did competition to land fresh content. Everybody found a job. The party had begun. Why's everyone saying it's ended then? Audience-size couldn't have shrunk.

How do OTTs really work? Three ways.

SVOD, as in Subscription-based Video on Demand (the likes of Netflix, Prime Video). This is the platform where paying members expect finer content.

The sorts that first placed desi series/films into the International Emmys. The same way Netflix annually aims for multiple Oscars. Unsure if the same aspiration applies to Indian originals.

There's AVOD, that's advertiser-based (such as YouTube). And a mix of both, where some premium stuff is behind a paywall (Zee5).

There's also TVOD, or Transaction-based Video on Demand, where you pay for a particular piece of content. The creator makes more, based on audience's watch-hours.

A young Hyderabadi producer tells me, "You could make upwards of R10 for every hour of your film watched (on Prime Video), it can come down to R3 now!" Pay-per-view is, of course, closest to cinema box-office.

Only, that OTTs insist all movies, regardless, must open in theatres first, before they get on their service. This takes care of the OTT's marketing/advertising costs for a film. Because the producer takes care of it!

Except, this deal makes sense if the film buzzes on OTT, soon after it's released in theatres. That ‘window' could be anywhere between 21 days, to max eight weeks! Audiences are aware of this. They don't show up at theatres then. Waiting to catch the film on OTT instead.

Small film bombs on big screens, fetching even lower price on the Internet. The producer suffers both ways. It's not a chicken-egg problem, if the chicken starts to eat its own egg, no?

"Across the board, budgets have been slashed to half, even one-third of what they used to be for OTT originals (particular long-form/series), a couple of years ago," says the Versova screenwriter. A director, exec-producer, and an actor, at my table in Juhu, furiously concur.

There is no moment in the movie industry when budget constraints haven't been the perennial peeve. When money - or conversations centred on it - enters the room, does honesty, hence art, go out the window?
I don't know. My job is to listen. The producer adds, "Even when there is resource crunch, the biggest chunk gets deployed towards the big stars. We're going back to those days."

This sounds like usual babble about old-world Bollywood; hardly new-age OTT.

"And if it's not stars, it's the same studios, producers, directors, on a permanent roster, where all the work must emanate from, since nobody has time to read that many scripts," the writer sighs. CVs rarely favour indies.

What follows is a gossipy, low-grade chatter on blatant favouritism, networking (corporate term for ‘nepotism'), over-invoicing, kickbacks, low-EQ/IQ gatekeeping…

None of which merit repetition in public, because they can hardly be verified in private.

While I have no personal lena-dena with any of this, and happy to be an amateur shrink over beers, why am I hopping between bars on an easygoing Monday night, sitting through a gruelling grouse-fest?

Think I started it. Basically, cribbing about the latest movie I'd watched the night before, i.e. Neeraj Pandey's Sikander Muqaddar on Netflix - such unbelievably television-like filmmaking; low on aesthetics, lower still on ambition.

Which is soon after Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha, on Prime Video, by the same, perfectly fine director, Neeraj (Dhoni, Baby, Special 26).

Likewise, a random one-line idea, heading towards a hair-splitting reveal; set between crappy sets and smoke on fake streets.

Sure, no such thing as bad movies. Everything finds an audience. But how did these even get made, I wondered (aloud). Okay, the subsequent bhadaas/blabber on my table is not gonna end soon. I should go home!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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