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How affordable over-the-top streaming has made

entertainment a malaise
BY SUGATA GHOSH, RAJESH NAIDU & GAURAV LAGHATE, ET BUREAU | UPDATED: Post a Comment
OCT 18, 2018, 07.13 AM IST

You know the man — in his early 50s, edgy but happy; glued to some hobby horse,
oblivious to the world. He hops on to the train, picks a quiet corner, avoiding the eyes of
familiar co-commuters. Fishing out the earphones from his pocket, he steps into the
distant world of Pablo Escobar, as the fugitive drug lord hides himself in an abandoned
cottage lined with wild thistles that border the Colombian grassland with a purple glow.

He stays with the story as he alights from the Mumbai suburban train and heads home in
an autorickshaw — unruffled by the traffic, dust and fumes, sultry September heat, blaring
microphones at the Ganapati pandals, as he continues shadowing the officials of US Drug
Enforcement Agency chasing a defiant Escobar, dogged and hounded for months, in the
last lap of a long, gripping biopic playing out on his Samsung handheld. The irresistible
plot keeps him awake till two in the morning, when his strained eyes and a palm numbed Big Change:
The end of Five-Year Plans: All you need to know
from holding the phone finally give way.

Our man has no appetite for the magic of reality. He just wants magic — his daily fix for which he trusts the abundant data and freebies
thrown in by bleeding telecom companies, and the affordable subscription rates of Amazon Prime and Netflix — even as the addictive
wonder robs his sleep, pushes back work deadlines and leaves him with a hangover on a raw Monday morning.

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GIVE ME MAGIC
Welcome to the world of ‘over-the-top’ (OTT) delights of streaming videos. It’s the new new fix of urban India, where men and women of
different ages are getting hooked on to movies and well-made serials like Fauda (an Israeli political thriller), Narcos (the Escobar story),
McMafia (a story about a Russian mafia family settled in London), Sacred Games (a Indian crime thriller) and The Good Wife (an
American political and legal drama).

There are more than 5,20,000 Netflix subscribers and 6,10,000 Amazon Prime subscribers in India. As the US and other western
markets mature, OTT players are taking a toehold in huge, comparatively untapped markets such as India, tempting users to fit an
inexpensive and flexible form of entertainment into their lives.

Last week’s media report of an unemployed young man walking into a Bengaluru rehab centre to cure himself of Netflix addiction could
well be an extreme case of a person detaching himself from life’s harsh realities. Perhaps not all binge-watchers of OTT movies and
serials indulge in pure escapism, but many find themselves, even if fleetingly, in a world of suspended disbelief.

“There was a time, when sitting in a cab or on a train for half an hour or one hour, one would contemplate or introspect,” says Dr
Priyanka Shah Dattani, counselling psychologist, NH SRCC Hospital. “This came under nuanced thinking about life. Today, this is slowly
disappearing in a lot of young and mature adults…. The whole process (of binge watching) disconnects you from the outside world and
provides you an alternative reality within the confines of a virtual world. This is suspension from reality. It’s affecting relationships, work,
productivity and the general quality of life.”

THE LURE
Suhel Khan, a stand-up comedian, says he is awake till 2 am and often dozes off while watching a video. “It’s the convenience factor
that works. I can watch at any time and any point of a narrative without being interrupted by advertisements. For me, an increase in
subscription charges does not matter... If you go to any premium coffee joint such as Starbucks, two people may end up spending Rs
1,000… As long as content on Netflix or Amazon is strong, people will pay for it,” says Khan.

Children are far more affected as they are chemically wired to emulate adults, says Dattani, who often comes across some whose sleep
pattern is terribly disrupted, with many managing rest at 2-3 am. For children, it is often more about “fitting in among peers” and catching

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up with them. So, they “find it cool to talk or write a post about a new series and seek validation from peers,” says Neha Shah,
founderpsychologist at Enable, a centre for therapy and special education. “I have observed children in the age group of 10-15 suffering
from attention deficit disorder. They point out that they have so many things to do that one thing leads to another,” says Shah.

Total time spent on video application has recorded a year-on-year growth of 85% to 40.5 billion hours in 2017. India’s online video
audience is estimated to reach 500 million by 2020, from 250 million in 2017. What is it they find so captivating about these videos?

Creativity, production quality, absence of ads and censorship. The platforms are a gateway to a new face of entertainment — a business
that has experimented and transformed itself in some way almost every decade to lure fickle, unforgiving viewers.

“Unlike television, I don’t have to wait for the next episode,” says retired journalist N Sachitanand, 78. “I get a complete season, with the
freedom to watch at any point. Three years ago, when I was with my daughter in Singapore, she introduced me to Netflix. I got hooked
on to two series. One is The Good Wife, which falls in my favourite genre of courtroom drama and the other is Designated Survivor. I
watch television only for news. But these days, I sleep late —between 11 pm and midnight, while earlier I used to sleep around 10.30.”

THE DREAM FACTORY

The world of showbiz has always moved with changes in in taste, time and lifestyle. Sometimes, technology brings about a dramatic
change or the death of an archaic law opens up new opportunities. A changing social milieu throws up new demands as it weaves new
stories. For many middle-aged Indian viewers, OTT videos are a reminder of the burst of creativity and talent when small screen
programming started in the early 1980s, with some of the finest artistes of Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi stage coming out with
unforgettable TV serials.

In showbiz history, perhaps nothing metamorphosed the way Hollywood did. In 1959, when David O Selznick was making A Farewell to
Arms, he had said, “Hollywood is like Egypt, full of crumbling pyramids. It will never come back. It will just keep crumbling until the wind
blows the last studio props across the street.”

While the once-famous studios did indeed totter, the swinging 1960s marked opulent attempts to win back dwindling audience with
fabulous productions such as Doctor Zhivago,Lawrence of Arabia and The Sound of Music. The ‘30s and ‘40s were an era when studios
such as MGM and Fox had to release a movie every fortnight to keep the show running.

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In a strange way, this old business model is once again being tried out with digital technology in some international OTT offerings. For
large global operators, prime source of revenue is new subscriptions, and not ads, endorsements or theatrical exhibition. They have to
come up with new productions — improving every time and splurging on stars — so the dream factory does not run out of steam.

But creativity cannot be endlessly replicated. While OTT platforms bet on creativity to grow subscriptions, they know — probably more
than anyone else — that creativity cannot be commoditised like a smartphone. A mobile can reproduce the perfection of a smartphone
with new features and live up to expectations of buyers, who promise a stream of revenue. But there is no way one can use the
yardstick of creativity to foretell how many subscribers a platform would acquire in a given quarter.

In the second quarter of this year, Nextflix stock fell 14% in the US amid doubts whether original content could keep pace with demands
of viewers. An episode of digital content production is about 1.5x-2x higher than that of traditional TV content and content from OTT
firms, most of which aren’t making money, is shot in real locations.

OTT providers, particularly not having the deep pockets of large companies, have to strike a mix of ad and subscription to stay afloat.

Indian consumers, especially millennials, from non-metro cities are still apprehensive about moving away from traditional mediums of
entertainment. “They are still in the ‘exploring’ phase and hence, a paid subscription does not make sense to them,” says Ashish Shah,
chief executive, Vertoz, a programmatic advertising company. “More than 95% of these millennials do not live in tier I cities. Losing out
on subscriptions from this huge chunk will result in them missing out on a substantial piece of the pie. Relying solely on a subscription-
based revenue model does not look like a great choice, at least in the current scenario.”

A viable strategy, he thinks, can be trying out advanced technologies like programmatic advertising, which can help OTTs generate more
revenue as well as obtain detailed audience insights.

THE SURGE
Since 2012, there has been a rapid rise of OTT platforms in India, with more than 35 operating today. It matched proliferation of 3G/4G
mobile internet services, which has crossed 75%, with smartphone penetration reaching 35% across users, says an EY-Ficci study.

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Besides global firms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, many local OTT platforms were launched in the past few years, a few
prominent ones being Hotstar, Zee5, SonyLIV, Eros Now and ALTBalaji. Most Indian consumers prefer to watch videos in vernacular
languages, with close to 93% of their time spent on videos in Hindi and regional languages, says an EY study.

OTT players know it’s a more price-sensitive audience. What nudges them to invest is the sense that Indian consumers of OTT are
starting to realise good content is no longer free.

“I think consumers find value in an OTT video service that has a huge library of content, preferably exclusive, some marquee originals
that everyone is talking about, ease of use and the right price,” says Rohit Dokania, senior vicepresident, IDFC Securities Research. For
the service providers, he thinks, an easier way to make money could be monetising non-exclusive content through advertisements and
placing exclusive content behind a paywall.

While the charm and magnificence of the big screen would remain decisive for established film makers, Netflix can be an enabler for
beginners in showbiz. “In India, a lot of films do not release for multiple reasons and Netflix could spread these stories, thus giving an
alternative to various filmmakers. It’s known to pay well for good content,” says Dokania.

“For niche films,” says Ashish Pherwani, partner, media & entertainment, EY India, “OTT-only releases will help in providing shelf space,
as the theatrical window is limited to 52 weekends in the year.”

With cell phones becoming second nature to Indians across ages, OTT streaming videos are the next seamless step. Anamika Dutta, a
postgraduate student of communication and journalism, Mumbai University, says, “Unlike television, content on these platforms neither
compromises on authenticity of a story nor dumbs down narrative to make it accessible. I am pretty certain I would never go back to
television. And going to a theatre to watch a film is more of a get-together with friends.” Though separated by generations, Anamika’s
views are strikingly similar to Sachitanand’s.

Movie goers in India, with their obsession for first day-first show, far outnumber members of the tiny club that Anamika, Suhel and
Sachitanand represent. But online streaming video players in India are betting big time on them, with plans to chip in Rs 3,500-4,000
crore to develop original content.

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It could make things tougher for Shanti J, a single working mom, who is trying to overcome binge-watching. Shanti is resorting to Screen
Time — a feature that shuts off the Netflix app in her iOS as long as she wants —to kill the fixation that sometimes worsens her
migraine. Her colleagues finds it amusing that her preferred antidote is the very iPhone that gives her the headache. For hours she sails
through episode after episode of Fauda, as her daughter, a medicine student, wrestles with Gray’s Anatomy. She hasn’t lost hope in
screen time, but is unsure how long it would take her to win the battle.

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