By Shailesh Kapoor
2000 and 2008 were watershed years for Indian television. 2000 gave us KBC and the ‘K-serials’, changing the scale at which the industry would thereafter operate. It also brought in dailies for good. 2008 brought in new stories and ideas to break away from the K-serial overdose by then, and the launch of Colors was the primary driver of this change. Going further back in the past, 1992 was the year when it all started, with the start of Zee TV and thus mass Hindi satellite television in India.
1992, 2000, 2008… If this was one of those guess-the-next-number-in-the-sequence questions, it would be a sitter. 2016 is the answer, and wait, we are in it already. Is there a next big change round the corner? There are no major signs of it as of now, but we have eight months to go, and one hopes there’s something cooking somewhere to keep the sequence going.
Even as the Indian television industry waits for its next content revolution, there is a parallel opportunity that many players are flirting with, and some very seriously too. And that’s the world of web-series. The launch of Permanent Roommates and then Pitchers by TVF gave this category a boost last year, and with some of the major film studios announcing their digital plans, the category is certain to gain momentum in 2016-17.
But things can often look more exciting than they actually are. Like most new categories, web-series in India is a category that’s still trying to find its feet. There is active investor interest in the category, given the ‘progressive’ nature of the content, and the general cynicism of the corporate world with mass television. But active interest does not make a business model.
In a country where television comes dirt cheap, expecting a large mass of audience to pay for content over the Internet would be a challenge. And if web-series have to rely only on ad revenue, they will struggle to find any real scale whatsoever.
Some argue audiences who spend on movie tickets would gladly pay for breakthrough content on the Internet too. That argument, though, is flawed on two counts.
For one, in the phrase ‘movie-going’ experience, the word ‘movie’ holds only as much value as the word ‘going’. That may not make much sense to a movie buff, but visiting a theatre for most audiences is as much about having a good time, as it is about watching a good film. The two may be correlated, but they are fundamentally different. Part of the value of the ticket price (and a sizeable part too) can be attributed to this ‘going’ element, something that the web-series medium can fundamentally not deliver.
The second flaw is around the notion of ‘breakthrough content’. Just by being a web-series, a content piece does not become breakthrough or cutting-edge. There is no such entitlement on offer, though many web-series producers tend to exercise it nevertheless. If you look at the collective quality of more than a dozen web-series already out, you will hesitate to use the word ‘breakthrough’ for the category as a whole. A series or two maybe, but not the category.
As more investment flows in and high-speed Internet penetrates India, we are bound to see more web-series in action. But to challenge conventional television, this category will need to set some rules of its own. Currently, it’s defined by what’s not on TV. Either because it’s too niche or too bold. We even have a web-series titled ‘I Don’t Watch TV’ that launched earlier this month!
Hence, in many ways, web-series is television outside the television set. As technology permeates further, the distinction between these two media will blur. And at some stage, the advertiser may look at buying them as a unit, at least in an ideal scenario when equitable measurement is available. That will be the proverbial proof-of-the-pudding time for the web-series category.
The web-series category has its task cut out, though the path may not be evident yet. Can it be the next content watershed that TV is searching hard, and unsuccessfully, for. Only time will tell.