By Shailesh Kapoor
While digital content has been making its presence felt in India for at least five years now, 2017 was an important year on this front. With the launch of Amazon Prime Video in December 2016 and ALT Balaji in April 2017, following up on the launch of Netflix in early 2016, a new content ecosystem was created. By the end of the year, the OTT original content industry had acquired a life of its own, with an estimated 200+ shows produced in the year.
Evidently, a lot more is still come. India’s smartphone penetration is a story of global interest. But unlike most western markets, where TV and OTT content are clubbed as one genre (even their award shows don’t make the distinction anymore), India is different. OTT is essentially a solo viewing experience, while TV has traditionally been a medium of family-level consumption, and shall remain so in a country with 95% single-TV households.
This contextual difference has created a polarisation of content. At one end is the traditional TV content, with soaps like Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai (weekday) and Naagin (weekend) being its flagbearers. At the other end is ‘edgy’ content created for solo consumption(often) by the cosmopolitan youth, on a mobile phone app. There aren’t enough true success stories in this area yet, but TVF’s 2015 show Pitchers was one of the early breakthroughs, and the recent Bose: Dead/ Alive on ALT Balaji has viewer advocacy going for it.
This polarization, however, is deeply flawed. Are TV audiences satisfied with their diet of daily soaps today? Not even remotely. The current satisfaction levels of core Hindi GEC viewers with the quality of content being dished out stands at an all-time low of 30-35%. There is a next level of fiction content waiting for be discovered in that medium.
Are digital audiences over the moon with the offering in that medium? Not for now, at least. Hindi movies still remains the most-preferred content on OTT platforms, and “web-seriesâ€, as they are called, still have quality benchmarks that are set by International shows than Indian ones, in the niche segment that understands and watches both.
Of course, TV audiences and digital audiences, as mentioned above, are not different people. There is a huge overlap of the universe, with the digital universe primarily being a subset of the TV universe today. The context (family vs. solo) may change, but the person is still the same. OTT campaigns that celebrate the death of television are creating the illusion of a reality which is largely non-existent, with less than 1% of urban India’s population having shunned TV to move to digital content exclusively.
The truth of the day is that both media need better content to fuel their respective business agendas in the coming year. The hit ratio of television shows (fiction) launched over 2016 and 2017 has been abysmal, at less than 15%, while the hit ratio of web-series won’t be much higher, once a viewership metric is established, hopefully in 2018 itself.
I hope 2018 sees the next logical step in the evolution of digital content, where the artificial separation between TV and OTT content is forgotten for good, and the TV+OTT industry is treated as one, with just a difference in screens and viewing context. In this new mindset, content creation will take priority, and the decision on the screen best suited to a piece of content will follow. Currently, we are thinking ‘for the screen’, than ‘for the idea’. And that’s not a long-term proposition at all!