Abstract
In this article, I foreground the importance of the ‘cinematic’ as the most important vector of video cultures in India. The article identifies how the timeline of video culture disruption in India deviates from countries with stronger television-based cultures. The availability of videocassettes and their ability to make movies more widely available was consequently of greater consequence in India than in other places, and a development that was still adjusting the video culture as digital distribution arrived. Internet distribution and digital production technologies have also brought significant changes to India's viewing culture, though again, the peculiarities of the Indian market make these changes distinctive. Where many countries have encountered greater access to foreign-produced content and services, key digital changes in India tie into access to and interest in a broader range of domestic cinema. The following analysis flags key moments of disruption and explores discussion of the emergence of pan-Indian film that coincided with streaming platform adoption in India.
In the 1970s when then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was facing massive protests in the country due to emergency measures she imposed, and a rally was called to unify the opposition, she ordered the screening of the cinematic blockbuster Bobby (1973, dir. Raj Kapoor), a coming-of-age romantic drama on the state-run channel Doordarshan to distract the masses from the ongoing protests. While the move did not have its intended effect, this anecdote has become etched in popular lore as an illustration of how politicians try to distract the opposition. During this authoritarian time of Emergency, the film Bobby had great cultural resonance and the fandom was immense. Because most people did not own television sets, neighbourhood screenings were organized to watch the film. This move to screen the film during the protest was called the ‘Bobby Trap’. It's an anecdote I heard multiple times growing up.
The importance of film – generally – in India cannot be overstated. It is the pinnacle form of video in the culture. Television drama, news, and sports coverage are also important parts of Indian media culture and industry, but the cinema has always occupied peak cultural importance. Creatives aspire to create cinema; it's also the medium through which other forms define themselves, whether in opposition or as inspiration.
This makes India very different from most Western contexts, where television occupied the centre of 20th-century viewing cultures, and has contributed – along with other contextual factors – to India's particular and peculiar experience of streaming video adoption. In this article, I foreground the importance of the ‘cinematic’ as the most important vector of video cultures in India. The article identifies how the timeline of video culture disruption in India deviates from countries with stronger television-based cultures. The development of videocassettes and their ability to make movies more widely available and not necessarily within the home is thus of greater consequence in India than other places, and this is a change that was still very present as digital distribution arrived.1
India is a complex mediascape and uncommonly multilingual. I draw my definition of the cinematic through key scholarship, based on grounded field interviews with creators, and through cultural references. Development of cinema is seen as emblematic of India's transition to a capitalist organization of society and polity (Prasad, 1998) Thus, Indian cinema plays a crucial role in cultural and political transformations in its address of nationhood, region, conflicts over caste and religion etc. (Vasudevan, 2010). The cinema also exerts an influence over its audience, as seen through fan culture (Srinivas, 2009, 2021). Fans frequently adopt and mimic (mostly Hindu) religious practices, such as performing rituals of worship before images of stars in theatres and worshipping the screen itself during the show or constructed shrines for stars (Srinivas, 2021). The theoretical literature cited argues that cinema in India is inseparable from its social, cultural, and economic fabric. Moreover, cinema remains the pinnacle of aspiration. Filmmakers and videographers (aspiring/ amateur/ professional) have always defined their practice in relationship to cinema and are frequently inspired to take up their profession because of their love for cinema and to elevate their practice to the cinematic medium (2013, 2016, 2021, 2022). Another indicator of cinema's role in culture is the use of a popular slang term ‘filmy’ in everyday parlance to refer to the craze of watching films and imitating the style and fashion, and melodramatic mode of address in everyday life. I draw on this rich embeddedness of films and film viewing in India in using ‘cinematic’ to highlight not merely textual or industrial features, but how film pervades the popular imagination.
The account begins in the 1980s when liberalization measures began and analogue video arrived in India, and gradually moves through the arrival of cable television and digital culture. Due their relative light weight, portability, and lower cost, digital technologies had a democratizing effect that allowed more people to produce, access, and consume media. The development of broadband internet infrastructure in the early 2000s then led to further accessibility to the means of production and consumption of video culture in the country.
Crucially, these moments of technological disruption challenged the dominance of practices of the ‘cinematic’ as a result of the expansion and diversification of content that coincided. Despite this diversification and the expanded abilities to control content, Indians experienced these adjustments differently from those in national contexts in which television had been the centre of storytelling culture. Elsewhere, significant adjustment took place, and concern over the ‘death of television’ was widespread, but in India, each of these moments of technological disruption led to greater anxiety over the implications for filmic culture. As these changes are still ongoing it is difficult to be certain what the eventual implications of streaming will be for India's video culture.
The following analysis flags key moments of disruption and how they coincided with streaming platform adoption in India. Internet distribution and digital production technologies have also brought significant changes to India's viewing culture, though again, the peculiarities of the Indian market make these changes distinctive. Where a key aspect of the streaming experience in many countries ties to greater access to foreign-produced content and services, key digital changes in India derive from access to broader range of domestic cinema and television.
The importance of the ‘cinematic’
India has been the largest film producing nation in the world since 2007. It produces 1800 to 2000 films annually in several languages. At the same time, the country leads the global film market in terms of the number of tickets sold. Advertisers in India are aware of the industry's popularity with audiences and have invested heavily in cinema-based advertising. The Indian film industry thus enjoys a variety of revenue sources and is expanding, with an increasing focus on digital technologies and regional languages. Increasing per capita income, an expanding middle class, growing demand from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities that haven’t maximized filmgoing, and the greater opportunity for revenue from international markets are all believed to be key growth drivers for the industry (Deloitte, 2016).
Despite the scale of the market, India's population is so diverse that Indians from different regions would find it difficult to communicate through a common language. This diversity is crucial to understanding the population scale of the country and why simple constructions of it as a ‘large’ market miss crucial context. Language disparity has led to the development of a segmented federation of state/regional media sectors and has also proven complicated for technological adoption. For example, streaming video platforms have to offer their interfaces in multiple languages in order to gain widest possible subscriber base. Given the linguistic diversity of India and the brevity of a single article, this article focuses primarily on Hindi-language, urban video culture in India.
The Indian television industry also has a massive audience base in India. Television programming in India includes entertainment programming, news, sports, and education programming. According to the Broadcast Audience Research Council, regional content helped to drive up total television consumption in the country and the regional industry also offers content in different languages. In terms of television viewership based on language, Hindi channels have been most preferred. TV penetration remains lower than Western norms. It increased to reach 69% in 2020, with most of the growth in semi-urban and rural areas, where penetration remains at 55% (Sun, 2023). This comparative under-penetration of television also explains why India's video culture is more deeply connected to cinema. Further, the film industry trumps the television industry in terms of revenue and, because of their international reach, Indian films are also seen by more people.
Another notable distinction of Indian screen consumption is that Western programming commands a minuscule viewership compared to domestic entertainment on Indian television (FICCI, 2017). Perhaps this can be tied to the national diversity within India, which is incredibly multilingual.2 On average, there is only a 36% chance that any two Indians can communicate with each other (Kawoosa, 2018). The linguistic diversity led to a highly fractured ecosystem. Hindi-language cinema and Bollywood may have been pervasive/dominant, but strong disparate cultures existed throughout India. Before the arrival of analogue video and then the introduction of digital technologies, there was little interaction among these cultures. Dislike of subtitles was pervasive but not of dubbing and – with the country's linguistic diversity – that left most of the different language groups cut off from one another. However, these dubs were only available for consumption in cinema theatres or on pirated video cassettes, and the quality of the dubbing was mediocre. Streaming not only accelerated the dispersion of regional content but also introduced high-quality dubbing and subbing practices.
The affordance of digital technologies brought change to the dynamics of India's video culture in some surprising ways. The arrival of digital technologies has led to greater interaction between local production circuits that have existed at the periphery of Indian film culture and the major central industry. The expansion of dubbing in regional languages and English, which has been enabled by digital technologies, has supported implications quite different from those of other countries, where struggles between national and international dynamics have been more central.
The distinctiveness of the Indian experience
Within India's linguistic segmentation, access to technology is also significantly structured by class. The availability of technology in India does not mean it is widely available. Research on 1980s video indicated that video technology, as well as cable and television sets, were only accessible to the middle and upper classes that account for approximately 1% of the Indian population (Tiwary, 2024). Similarly, the multiplex phenomena (detailed below) emerged in urban centres and were pricier than single movie theatres, making them accessible to only a small segment of the population. Still, the lack of widespread in-home technology supported moviegoing – but expanded cinema viewing to informal parlours and libraries.
Liberalization that opened the Indian economy to foreign trade, launched after July 1991, provides another crucial contextual condition that has structured Indian video culture in recent decades. Cars, electronic gadgets, computers, and a range of modern household items appeared and the consumer goods sector expanded rapidly. The urban middle classes reaped the benefits of liberalization and modernization programmes as they entered a new world of computers and electronics. But this consumer goods revolution also spread quickly to rural areas and to minor towns. Soon, many of the symbols of urban modernity – scooters, motor bikes, electronic devices, VCRs (video cassette recorders), refrigerators, sunglasses – became available to the more affluent in many villages (Blom Hansen, 1999). Liberalization supported the opening of several new industries, including media, and a enabled a boom in the expansion of satellite television.
Indian cinema has a relatively long history but experienced significant change in recent decades very much tied to liberalization and its implications for the video ecosystem within India. Steady adjustments – often tied to the simultaneous introduction of multiple technologies – include the introduction of videocassettes and satellite, and have added complexity to cinema's cultural role. Historically, cinema provided a space for public access, a symbolically significant affordance for a society divided along class, caste, gender, and religious lines (Rajadhyaksha, 2003). In its dominant commercial form, cinema was taxed and regulated by the state due to the fact that it provided entertainment for the masses, as opposed to being developmental/pedagogical in its message for a newly independent country (Vasudevan, 2008). This changed with the advent of liberalization in the 1990s as Indian cinema finally gained industry status from the government and found a significant market abroad; its export brought a lucrative income stream (Vasudevan, 2008).
The influx of television sets and videocassette recorders (VCRs) into India's domestic space displaced the centrality of commercial cinema in the 1980s. Film revenues decreased by 40% and a budding video culture was supported by a vast underground of piracy through video libraries, video parlours, and television sets. New Delhi was awarded the opportunity to host the ninth Asian Games in 1982, and the event triggered profound growth of television in India. Colour television was introduced during the event and an unparalleled technological restructuring began (Tiwary, 2022). By the end of 1994, an estimated 12 million households were receiving satellite channels, and by 2000, this number had risen to more than 35 million. (BestMediaInfo Bureau, 2022).
The advent of video created a revolution, of sorts, where the audience withdrew from the theatres and a share of viewing moved to the private space of their living rooms, as well as semi-informal and semi-illegal spaces of video libraries and video parlours. Pirated video cassettes of the latest Hindi and Hollywood movie releases, animated cartoons, and Pakistani serial drama were some instances of the expanded range of content being watched inside middle-class homes, along with family wedding and home videos, straight-to-video erotic thrillers, devotional videos, and the video news magazine. Although videocassettes were a crucial distribution technology in this change, the growth of television in the 1980s was inextricably intertwined as part of this revolution. Television ownership increased alongside a rapidly expanding audio and videocassette market that existed almost entirely in the pirate economy, and in spaces like video libraries (spaces for renting videos). Video parlours (informal theatre-like spaces showing pirated content on television) and ‘video theatres’ cropped up inside restaurants, buses, and shops that began to instal video and television equipment (Sundaram, 2010).
The arrival of video triggered a moral panic. From anxieties about piracy to fear of pornography and violence, the film industry perceived video as a plague that needed monitoring and regulation, and it pressured the government to take action, although the industry's major concern was less moral than financial. However, another narrative emerged alongside this paranoia. Letters to the newspaper editors written by readers from small towns recounted how video had exposed them to a wide variety of films that were often not released outside of urban centres. This sense of excitement and possibility of access to media was echoed by videographers, editors, and cameramen. Video's portability and affordability, in contrast to the expensive technology of celluloid, encouraged many enthusiasts either to take up distribution via parlours and libraries or produce a wide array of films made on video.
This technological revolution accelerated with liberalization measures undertaken in the 1990s that led to the arrival of satellite television in India, and satellite, in turn, delivered a diverse array of fiction and non-fiction programming. Before satellite service from Star TV arrived in 1991, the entirety of Indian television was the state-owned channel Doordarshan (Kumar, 2006). Initially, satellite services catered to a primarily English-speaking, middle-class audience by offering international soaps and live coverage of international sports. Zee TV, a competing satellite service, launched a year later in 1992 and positioned itself as the Hindi-language alternative to Star TV, with a mix of soaps, talk shows, and sitcoms. Other commercial networks, such as Sun TV and Eenadu TV, started programming services in regional languages, especially in South India (Kumar, 2006), that collectively constructed a fragmented patchwork of television across the country.
Where Doordarshan focused on state development programming with a mix of progressive melodramas through the 1990s, the arrival of channels such as Zee TV heralded entertainment programming that included game shows, horror, musical shows, and weekly fiction programming. Much of this fiction centred around female protagonists living in the city and addressed themes such as working women, infidelity, and other challenges faced by modern women. Such themes corresponded to the audience who had access to television sets and satellite technology, which was largely limited to the middle class residing in metro areas.
As access to television became more widespread and was not just confined to urban areas near the turn of the century, a shift occurred in the type of content being produced. Programming diversified so that the massive success of the reality competition show Kaun Banega Crorepati? (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), hosted by Bollywood legend Amitabh Bacchchan, coincided with success of family soap dramas produced by Balaji Television such as Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (The Mother in Law Was Once a Daughter in Law) and Kahaan Ghar Ghar Ki (Every House's Story). Both dramas profoundly changed the landscape of content on television in the country; airing five times a week, they dominated audience ratings. These textual forms, reality shows and the infinite fictional storytelling (five days a week every year, no season) of family melodramas, continue to dominate in the Indian television landscape.
In response to television channelling the family melodrama energy of Bollywood films, the film industry responded by diversifying its content offerings. The period of economic liberalization resulted in the corporatization of the film industry and the ‘Bollywood’ phenomenon came into being with the gigantic overseas success of a group of Bombay family melodramas (Rajadhyaksha, 2003). Domestically, this period also witnessed generic diversification evident in the emergence of the new genre of the ‘urban action’ film characterized by the dissolution of older melodramatic binaries of good/evil, country/city, police/criminal (Vasudevan, 2002) and the formation of two different and somewhat oppositional film genres in 1990s Hindi cinema: the family film and the gangster film. Family films presented the fantasy world of wealth and grandeur (such as Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham) while the gangster film depicted the darker side of the urban landscape (Mazumdar, 2008). These changes were heralded in film form through the arrival of the multiplex that encouraged segmentation of audiences by catering to different tastes. The multiplex, with its high ticket price and better viewing facilities, attracted the middle class back to the theatres (Athique, 2011). The multiplex became the preferred choice of the middle-class audience by offering a better standard of theatre infrastructure, better quality of video and audio, and a wider choice of entertainment than the single-screen theatre. Aparna Sharma (2003) also observes that the Indian multiplex positioned itself as the theatre for accessing the ‘latest’ from a wide array of cinematic fare: a mix of mainstream, parallel, regional, and art cinema, both domestic and foreign.
The multiplex intervention also aims to encourage cinemagoing across various audience segments by ensuring options for a variety of tastes appear on a regular basis. Non-mainstream films are unlikely to attract the same size of audiences as conventional films but, because of their low budget and the high ticket price charged by the multiplexes, these films are still lucrative. The multiplex offers a space where diverse kinds of cinema can coexist, and it also helps create a niche audience for small-budget, independent and short films that are less feasible within the structural dynamics of single-screen cinemas.
At this moment, the practices of dubbing film became more widespread. In the 1990s, inter-lingual dubbing of films – especially between Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada – became more prevalent (Ganti, 2021). Factors such as the expansion of satellite television, a resurgence in theatrical attendance, and the desire of mainstream film producers to tap new markets, either by dubbing their box-office successes into other languages or conceiving of their films for audiences beyond their linguistic region at the outset, contributed to rise of dubbing (Ganti, 2021).
Liberalization consequently introduced significant changes in film's industrial landscape as well as its form, changes that were still being incorporated when digitization instigated yet further change. These transformations illustrate newer circuits of cinematic exhibition and experimentation in film form that arrived before digital technologies. The multiplex and the growing multiplicity of TV channels led to audience segmentation and the production of generically diverse and experimental content, while dubbing opened up regional markets to other domestic markets in the country. We can observe a dynamic interplay between technological disruption and diversification among the video, television, and film industries that intensifies the accessibility of video production and consumption with the arrival of the internet and digital technology on a larger scale.
Thus, Indian video culture clearly adjusted to numerous significant technological and infrastructural changes of media even before the advent of the technologies that shaped the experience of digital. In the next section, I delineate and analyse how these changes and infrastructures furthered the arrival of digital technologies in India, and their role in the rise of pirate cinephile and local film industries. I also explore India becoming a mobile-first market, and how this infrastructure impacted the over the top services (OTT) space.
The pirate cinephile and non-industrial film practices
The post economic liberalization period also witnessed the proliferation of non-legal media practices that opened up contested networks of production, circulation, and consumption. Access to new digital video and audio technologies moved film and music further into informal markets. Digital technologies accelerated the democratization of media consumption and production, and diversified content much like in other countries. Video also changed temporal control over cinema by introducing the ability to fast forward, rewind, record, and pause as cinema's most engaged spectators were now able to determine their own experience of film. The technologies enabled the emergence of cinephile culture on a broader scale, which has implications for cultural processes of media production and consumption.
The practice of piracy plays a key role in shifts in Indian video cultures, but for the sector I focus on here, the implications differed from typical pirate practices. A new type of film society reliant on informal screenings emerged through online forums and web portals that film scholar Moinak Biswas (2007) argues enabled a new cinephilia across various cities in India. He observed that small groups formed around the liquid crystal display (LCD) projector and the DVD player in Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Calcutta, and in smaller cities and towns. The groups often held film discussions alongside screenings, although the bigger shift resulted from the ability of cinephiles to connect virtually. He argues that these societies reincarnated the film societies of a pre-digital era, though the composition of these societies also differed from the earlier film societies as the new ones were connected to virtual communities on the web, as opposed to those linked to home viewing that were smaller in size and based on personal acquaintance and friendship.
Online communities emerged as cinephile formations that became a site for critical discussion for mainstream as well as user-generated content that created alternate film productions as well as archives of non-industrial filmmaking practices. For instance, Kuhu Tanvir (2013) argues that the collection of videos on YouTube constitutes a pirate archive. Her conceptualization of this virtual archive as ‘pirate’ is a response to the state-controlled film archive: in contrast to the seemingly stable official film archive, the pirate archive is virtual, mobile, and at odds with the legal framework. This pirate archive, she argues also constitutes a culture of exposure and cinephilia that is global in nature. These cinephiles were producers, editors, and curators of this archival collection, thus making it a network of archives that was constantly being built, transformed, and erased. Thus, digital technologies fostered an expansion of distribution of media content through legal and grey channels. This expansion brought mainstream (national and regional) cinematic practices into conversation with the local, and produced and expanded a cinephilic culture that constituted itself around the production and consumption of the cinematic.
New filmmaking influences and practices
This cinephilia also encouraged innovation in film production practices. Exposure to world cinema and connection with cinephile communities via social media combined with the availability of cheap, portable, and lightweight digital production technologies supported new filmmaking practices. These diverse practices included short films, student films, films made for online cinephile cultures, and competition films. Notably, cheap digital films were being made in local circuits outside of the mainstream Hindi film circuits such as Malegaon in Maharashtra, Manipur, Ladakh, and Meerut.
The new digital technologies fostered an excitement for filmmaking throughout India. The available of lightweight digital technologies facilitate infrastructures for film making and film distribution. Amateur, indie, and mainstream filmmakers all used video cameras, computers, internet bandwidth, and sound mixers in their production process. Digital SLR cameras were most popular because of their cost, lightweight portability, and ability to capture high-definition images. These cameras also become useful in capturing video in places where shooting is not allowed because of their compact size. Mainstream Hindi movies used DSLR cameras to shoot action sequences in crowded places and give the action a sense of dynamism. The mobile phone also emerged as a popular tool for aspiring amateur filmmakers who uploaded their work on YouTube, cinephile groups on Facebook or film festivals tailored exclusively for mobile phone filmmaking such as the 48-hour film festival.
In parallel, local industries developed in cities of regions in India such as Malegaon, Meerut and others due to the availability of digital technologies. The local films these circuits produced drew from local traditions and practices; sometimes they tried to address local issues and engage with local politics, and the films are in the local dialect. These local film circuits were not isolated but had intricate connections, linkages and tensions with mainstream industrial practices (Tiwary, 2015). This relationship between local and national industries underscores the fact that the cinematic has always been aspirational, despite the emergence of new technologies that expand access to media production and consumption. Digital technologies give rise to local film cultures in the form of production and consumption, such as local film festivals, video theatres, and the availability of VCDs (video CDs) of these films for purchase at local kiosk shops (Tiwary, 2015; Bhuyan, 2017).
To be clear, non-industrial filmmakers were not placing their filmmaking practices and cultures of viewing and discussing movies in opposition to the hegemonic commercial industry. Rather, the emergence of cheap, lightweight and portable digital technologies of production and diverse exhibition sites enabled them to make films and release them in the public domain for consumption and recognition. Digital technologies expanded the sites of screen exhibition, which in turn altered pre-digital dynamics of cinemagoing in movie theatres, at home, and in informal parlours, to include wherever phones might be taken. Different practices emerged in different places in a way that resists easy categorization as national, regional, mainstream, or independent phenomena. Although heterogeneous in their formal and generic concerns, their film grammar is marked by an appropriation of the short film form, serious thematic concerns, and a linear mode of storytelling.
The significant changes in film exhibition and circulation, and the emergence of diverse sites of film discussion have greatly helped non-industrial filmmaking practices to proliferate. Barbara Klinger (2006) notes that to think about the reception of films in such ‘nondedicated’ locales is key to grasping the depth and breadth of cinema's social circulation and cultural function. Newer platforms, including video sharing websites, virtual communities and web portals, as well as physical spaces such as film clubs and competitions that also relied upon the internet as a site of exhibition, spread the experience of films (Klinger, 2006). These locations not only exhibited films but were also emerging spaces for film discussions or evaluation in the form of ratings, the comments column, blog posting, or discussions organized by a group at a physical location. These new sites created alternatives to the theatrical modes of exhibition. The cinematic remained central as evinced through production and distribution practices. It was evinced through content watched in conventional cinemas and produced by the dominant Bollywood industry. Alternatively, content was consumed via film clubs, through streaming, and by amateurs making shorts. More importantly, during this time, YouTube and Facebook were critical to expanding the presence of dubbed Hollywood films in the Indian media landscape by serving as key platforms for publicizing and promoting the films (Ganti, 2021).
The advent of digital technology further democratized and diversified film consumption and production practices in India, where the category of the ‘local’ is added to the established categories of ‘national’ and ‘regional’ cinema. This diversification is accelerated by the rise of mobile phone infrastructure, which I will elucidate in the next section.
Mobile-first market
India's reliance on mobile infrastructures provides crucial context: in India, mobile infrastructure is constitutive of how the majority experiences and perceives what the internet is. It has a big impact on pricing tiers and factors heavily in aesthetic decisions as a majority will watch OTT shows on their small mobile screens. Additionally, activities that seem unrelated to content production, such as partnering with mobile companies to drive a service's subscriber base, become core to the survival of services and their ability to create content.
Accessing entertainment services accounts for most Indian internet use (FICCI, 2021). By the early 2020s, almost all telecom service providers offered mobile data packages for subscribers starting from a minimal price of Rs. 10 or even less (Tiwary, 2020). Mobile phones with multimedia capabilities thus provided people from all social strata unprecedented access to all kinds of media content, making this technological development more transformative for more Indians than television or satellite. Mobile phones have become the preferred viewing device for many Indians mainly due to reasonably priced smartphones, better internet penetration, and low mobile data charges. Even basic mobile phone models come with a camera, radio, and music player with recording, and Bluetooth options. Cost-effective data storage technologies such as micro and mini-SD cards have augmented the media capacities of these phones (Tiwary, 2020).
Just as the features of the Indian context led to particular take-up of video, digital technologies are also shaped by existing conditions. The limited wired infrastructure that has led mobile phone screens to be the dominant screen for accessing internet-distributed audiovisual content is likely the most salient of such conditions. Emerging as a ‘mobile-first’ market, India is now home to 700 million active internet users, second only to China (PTI, 2023); however, only 20% are able to carry out transactions online (NIC), a prerequisite for becoming regular customers of multi-territory services such as Netflix and Amazon. Nevertheless, the new practices reliant on digital technologies require the development of broadband internet infrastructure and internet-distributed services (discussed locally as OTT) in India.
Bandwidth remains a major issue as India has one of the lowest broadband speeds in the world, an average of 29.85 mbps compared to the US average of 99.3 mbps. Social media, entertainment, and communications are the top three activities in which Indian internet users are engaged. Notably, the usage of OTT platforms in rural India is on par with urban India. This demonstrates that the Indian market is still in a period of early-stage adoption and expansion and makes it of interest to companies seeking growth.
This technology forms the backbone of the emerging streaming sector. The online video streaming market in India has witnessed unprecedented growth. Despite the buzz around global OTT service providers – such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video – the field in India is presently dominated by the digital arm of established local TV channels (HotStar, Sony LIV, Voot, Zee5). Thus international OTT platforms such as Netflix and Prime Video have struck content licensing deals with local players such as Dharma Productions and T-Series (once the most widely subscribed YouTube channel globally) that provide exclusive rights to Bollywood and regional movies (Bhushan, 2016; Jarvey and Szalai, 2016). Netflix and Prime Video have partnered with most of the top Bollywood production houses in the country to expand their catalogues and commission original titles. Interestingly, major domestic OTT platforms such as Hotstar, SonyLIV, AltBalaji, and Hoichoi all provide the digital arms of established local TV channels/TV production houses in India. While Hotstar, SonyLIV, AltBalaji, and Hoichoi already have large local libraries with which to attract subscribers Netflix and Prime Video are partnering with domestic production houses as they are more attuned to audience tastes. The importance of Indian film producers to streaming services demonstrates the centrality of cinema in India. Additionally, international OTT platforms are courting movie stars, respected film directors and prestige film production houses in order to gain a footing in the Indian market.
Pan-India film
The expansion of OTT platforms also led to the mainstreaming of regional film circuits. As such, OTT platforms have played a partial role in the formation of the pan-Indian film. What is a pan-Indian film? To put it as simply as possible, a pan-Indian film caters to the tastes and sensibilities of people and communities across the country and is produced on a blockbuster scale with the biggest Hindi or regional stars as leads (depending on the language of the film). What is uncommon and has led to the emergence of this term is that before streaming, only Hindi-language cinema (known as Bollywood) was considered pan-Indian.3 An example of a regional film rising to pan-Indian status can be seen in the national and global blockbuster RRR (2022, dir. S.S Rajamouli), which won the 2023 Oscar for Best Original Song. This film's global reach was aided by streaming on Netflix and exposed the international community to Indian cinema beyond Bollywood and to the existence of multiple regional film industries.
The significance of the discourse around the pan-Indian film may be best captured in an anecdote. Around 2019, a relative of mine who absolutely refused to watch regional-language content because ‘subtitles are boring’, animatedly recommended Tamil language films to me. Rhapsodizing about how these films are better than Hindi films, he mused over why he was not open to watching them before. This was echoed by neighbours and informal conversation with my respondents during the course of research on OTT cultures in India. Streaming provided uncommon exposure not only to international content but also national content in regional languages. Many expressed how their expectations of film had broadened beyond Bollywood after being exposed to a diversity of offerings.
The phenomenon of pan-Indian films, and the social media buzz surrounding them, has occupied a large space in conversations around Indian cinema for the past few years. Be it interviews with film personalities, talks on box-office numbers, or discussions among movie buffs, the idea of pan-Indian films has become all-pervasive. The success of S.S. Rajamouli's RRR (starring Ram Charan and Jr NTR) and Prashanth Neel's KGF: Chapter 2 (starring Yash, Raveena Tandon, and Sanjay Dutt) in 2022 accelerated this conversation (Bhaskar, 2022). The pan-Indian film emerges as a reaction to Hindu nationalism but also as a response to new technological developments that threaten the primacy of film and offer a diversity of content thematically and linguistically. Yet technological development also plays a partial role.
Appreciating this diversity is tied to expansion and acceleration of digital technologies, represented in this case by OTT platforms. Digital technologies led to diversification of production practices and content, and that content was accessible on screens including in cinema theatres, on television, VCDs, at local film festivals, and via mobile phones. Streaming platforms further accelerated the trend away from theatre-going. It has been seen as a threat by the mainstream Hindi film industry, as it has affected footfall in cinema theatres, so this sector of the industry has sought to assert the importance of the moviegoing experience. This moment has resonances with the 1980s moment highlighted at the beginning of the article. In that moment, cinema responded by making big-budget action multi-starrers. Now, four decades later, the spectacle-oriented action genre is back, but as a pan-Indian form. Ironically, while streaming is seen as a threat to filmgoing, it also partially enables this pan-Indian film phenomenon by offering multilingual domestic content, dubbing and subtitling it in various languages.
As suggested by the anecdotes, one reason is that audiences were exposed to regional films through OTT platforms that have offered the films wider distribution and better subtitling and dubbing in various regional languages. These viewers are now open to watching films with dubbing/subtitles, which makes it easier for a non-Hindi film to become pan-Indian. Indeed, most Hindi and regional-language films now come with dubbed version/subtitles in the cinema, a phenomenon that has largely been absent and restricted to Hollywood blockbusters, such as those in the Marvel cinema universe. Not only big-budget films, but even the smaller budget, high-on-content regional films are doing well on OTT. The pan-Indian film might be a short-lived phenomenon, as we are still in that moment, but it is worth highlighting as the phenomenon points to the acceptance and mainstreaming of regional cinema in the country via OTT platforms.
The interfaces of many of the popular OTT platforms have specific sections for regional films, and that is giving a boost to viewership. Even if the language is unknown to the viewer, they can still easily watch the film. Talking about how OTT platforms have helped regional cinema to become pan-India hits, Gaurav Banerjee, Head Content, Disney+ Hotstar & HSM Entertainment Network, Disney Star, says: OTT platforms offer viewers the opportunity to discover content, sans geographical and language barriers. This is helping viewers widen their watch preferences which are slowly, and steadily, building the market for regional titles. With evolving consumer needs, we believe OTT platforms are becoming stations that are giving audiences content options that appeal to their sensibilities. (Sur, 2022)
Many moderate box-office performers have become top trending films on their respective OTT platforms after their release. The dubbing industry is booming, with lots of regional films getting dubbed and showcased once again on OTT platforms. At times, even with subtitles, regional films are making an impact across India. ‘With the language barrier diminishing steadily, our aim is to offer access to viewers their local and international content in different regional languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, allowing for an easy transfusion of titles from one region to another,’ concludes Banerjee (Sur, 2022).
Due to its linguistic diversity, the Indian market has always focused on national, regional, and local media content production and consumption practices, as opposed to international content. Hindi-language content is seen as dominant and pan-Indian in both cinema and television. However, the country has robust regional film and television industries, and even local industries could be identified for a short time during the emergence of the digital moment. These industries had their specific audiences based on language, but the discourse around the pan-India phenomenon signals a shift to recognition that films made in languages other than Hindi can appeal to a mass Indian audience. While this moment might be short-lived, it does point to a significant feature of the Indian market – audiences want content that is culturally rooted, and they find that in Hindi and other language cinema and television. There is uncommon diversity of content within in the domestic market due to linguistic diversity.
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Video culture in India remains caught in a push-and-pull dynamic between disruption, diversification, and consolidation, dynamics structured by the uncommon priority of film as the centre of the country's screen culture. Since its inception in 1913, the Indian film industry has produced films from various locations and languages. It is only post-Independence that Hindi cinema emerged as the national cinema, although the country maintained robust film industries in other languages. The arrival of analogue and digital video technologies democratized means of production and distribution, and heralded non-industrial and local films and generic diversification of Hindi films.
More recently, the Digital India infrastructure development made it increasingly possible for OTT platforms to operate in India on a mass scale and enabled the dubbing and subtitling of regional content throughout the country.4 These technological changes challenged the dominance of Hindi cinema and encouraged the diversification of media production and content. The arrival of OTT accelerates the diversity of offerings generically and linguistically, and supports the emergence of a notion of pan-Indian films from outside of the Bollywood hegemon. While it is too early to say if the pan-India phenomenon will become a dominant feature of Indian film or one of many subsectors, it captures the shifting generic and thematic changes in media production. This broad map of the development of video cultures in India aims to capture a moment of transformation when practices of streaming enter the picture.
These transformations reveal the distinctiveness of the Indian market. However, it does not make the Indian market only a case study, but also a vector to understand the dynamics of global streaming markets as well as theorizing on these dynamics at large. With 700 million active internet users and counting, India is the largest market for streaming in the world right now (as international streamers are not allowed in China). The majority of the world's population is located in the Global South, and the Indian market can offer clues as to how streamers orient themselves in this part of the world and in relation to pre-digital conditions different from those of the West. For example, being a mobile-first and price-sensitive market, Netflix introduced a mobile-only plan for India in 2019 and then rolled it out in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand (Bhushan and Szalai, 2020; Sekhose, 2022). Points of commonality in the Indian experience resonate with accounts of Brazil, Turkey, and Nigeria – also presented in this special issue – and illustrate the confluence of forces that broadly connect many experiences of streaming outside the Global North.
While this article only addresses the role of video in Hindi-speaking urban India, it has tried to convey the distinctiveness of the Indian market and how it can offer us ways to think about issues prevalent in global streaming studies through registers of mobile infrastructure, and the role of the ‘cinematic’ and language as being crucial to understanding practices of localizing content.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
