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Beyond Netflix, Other OTT Platforms Have Sprung Up

The plot opens with the risqué, setting a straightforward tone as to the nature of the content you’re about to consume—four thugs barge into a house where a couple is having sex. The scene that ­follows details the couple, in various stages of undress, now bound by the thugs, giving a ­total of eight minutes of screen time to the actress caught in the situation. But even ­before, what made you click on that link had squarely cracked its target audience’s ­interests. This short-film, available on the OTT (over the top) platform Ullu, is suggestively titled Ghapaghap. It’s just one of the many ­titles crafted to suit an emerging market that, as of now, bypasses the proverbial scissors of the ­censor board.

Netflix and Amazon Prime appear to be on top of the OTT pyramid. Last year’s Netflix web ­series Sacred Games showcased frontal nudity, a first for a mainstream Indian production, with Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane as ­co-directors. The two big platforms, though, prize their products on being ‘quality’ content. Beyond these two, lower down the pyramid, but with promises of a broader base in terms of audi­ence numbers, a few other OTT platforms have sprung up. They offer quick productions under a controlled budget that can be consumed as quickly by audiences. On account of time-tested sellability, erotica and innuendo have become key themes of most of the content on these other platforms. The subscription rates of these services are way cheaper than Netflix and Prime and target audiences have been focused upon too—viewers in tier 2-3 towns and those beyond the demographic that pays for more expensive OTT platforms in urban India….Click here to read the full story