What’s up with OTT industry?

The party is overrdquo is what I hear Bombayrsquos producers even the bigger ones tell me when casually asked ldquoHowrsquos it goingrdquo What was this party exactlyWell to start with you literally notice its absence in the evenings out in Andheri West Mumbairsquos showbiz capital where afterwork bars look relatively barren ldquoPeople donrsquot have so much money anymorerdquo Irsquom toldItrsquos also true that the pandemic permanently sucked the life out of most cityrsquos nights You sense it everywhere Mumbai or Andheri arenrsquot exceptionsWhat the pandemic unwittingly did for these parts though is provide unprecedented opportunitiesemployment through a whole new industryThat is streaming servicesOTT platforms Netflix for instance dropped in India in January 2016 Hotstar in May 2016 and Amazon Prime Video in December 2016 Several Indian OTTs followedGuesstimates then suggested it would take about a decade for Indians to wholly adopt a new mediatechnology that was at once a theatre and a nearunlimited DVD librarymdashthe platform naturally allowing for unparalleled diversity in storytellingThe lockdownmdashfor lack of cinemas and fresh content on network TVmdashhastened that move to OTT among certain audiences into two years 202021 flatIndia is probably a rare market where the majority accessed the Internet through their cellphones 800 million plus first rather than the computerEverybody in a film industry full of freelancers and startup entrepreneurs has scripts or a skill The demand to produce software given eyeballs grew exponentiallyAs did competition to land fresh content Everybody found a job The party had begun Whyrsquos everyone saying itrsquos ended then Audiencesize couldnrsquot have shrunkHow do OTTs really work Three waysSVOD as in Subscriptionbased Video on Demand the likes of Netflix Prime Video This is the platform where paying members expect finer contentThe sorts that first placed desi seriesfilms into the International Emmys The same way Netflix annually aims for multiple Oscars Unsure if the same aspiration applies to Indian originalsTherersquos AVOD thatrsquos advertiserbased such as YouTube And a mix of both where some premium stuff is behind a paywall Zee5Therersquos also TVOD or Transactionbased Video on Demand where you pay for a particular piece of content The creator makes more based on audiencersquos watchhoursA young Hyderabadi producer tells me ldquoYou could make upwards of R10 for every hour of your film watched on Prime Video it can come down to R3 nowrdquo Payperview is of course closest to cinema boxofficeOnly that OTTs insist all movies regardless must open in theatres first before they get on their service This takes care of the OTTrsquos marketingadvertising costs for a film Because the producer takes care of itExcept this deal makes sense if the film buzzes on OTT soon after itrsquos released in theatres That lsquowindowrsquo could be anywhere between 21 days to max eight weeks Audiences are aware of this They donrsquot show up at theatres then Waiting to catch the film on OTT insteadSmall film bombs on big screens fetching even lower price on the Internet The producer suffers both ways Itrsquos not a chickenegg problem if the chicken starts to eat its own egg noldquoAcross the board budgets have been slashed to half even onethird of what they used to be for OTT originals particular longformseries a couple of years agordquo says the Versova screenwriter A director execproducer and an actor at my table in Juhu furiously concurThere is no moment in the movie industry when budget constraints havenrsquot been the perennial peeve When moneymdashor conversations centred on itmdashenters the room does honesty hence art go out the windowI donrsquot know My job is to listen The producer adds ldquoEven when there is resource crunch the biggest chunk gets deployed towards the big stars Wersquore going back to those daysrdquoThis sounds like usual babble about oldworld Bollywood hardly newage OTTldquoAnd if itrsquos not stars itrsquos the same studios producers directors on a permanent roster where all the work must emanate from since nobody has time to read that many scriptsrdquo the writer sighs CVs rarely favour indiesWhat follows is a gossipy lowgrade chatter on blatant favouritism networking corporate term for lsquonepotismrsquo overinvoicing kickbacks lowEQIQ gatekeepinghellipNone of which merit repetition in public because they can hardly be verified in privateWhile I have no personal lenadena 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 grousefestThink I started it Basically cribbing about the latest movie Irsquod watched the night before ie Neeraj Pandeyrsquos Sikander Muqaddar on Netflixmdashsuch unbelievably televisionlike filmmaking low on aesthetics lower still on ambitionWhich is soon after Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha on Prime Video by the same perfectly fine director Neeraj Dhoni Baby Special 26Likewise a random oneline idea heading towards a hairsplitting reveal set between crappy sets and smoke on fake streetsSure no such thing as bad movies Everything finds an audience But how did these even get made I wondered aloud Okay the subsequent bhadaasblabber on my table is not gonna end soon I should go homeMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper