Era of the Individual Viewer? Taste,Value,and Creative Media Work in India’s Streaming Industries

Abstract

How do key players in Bombay’s screen industries—producers, directors, writers, and business developers—understand, imagine, and navigate the dizzying new world of streaming platforms in India? Tracking the emergence of symbiotic relationships between new streaming platforms and established media professionals, I discuss how a restructuring of industry dynamics is elemental to the processes of cultural legitimation of new streaming tastes and the reconfigurations of the relationships between texts, industries, and audiences. Through case studies of a few prominent creative professionals associated in various capacities with global and local streaming platforms, I sketch the multiple linkages between contemporary streaming cultures and the structural histories of both film and television in the subcontinent. Ultimately, this article argues that media workers’ self-reflexivity and theorizations about the industry-in-digital transit help us not only grasp the heterogeneity of this moment, but also trace notions of value and taste in Bombay’s emerging digital media ecologies.

In the summer of 2019, Bombay’s creative industries were humming with new possibilities. Almost everyone I met—producers, actors, directors, cinematographers, screenwriters, directors, and editors—was either working on a streaming show or had a ready script in their back pocket to pitch to one platform or another. Actors whose screen careers had long halted in film or television found a new lease of life in the surfeit of new “content” that was underway. “There aren’t any out-of-work actors in Bombay anymore,” joked a friend who was simultaneously interviewing for Head of Content positions at Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Sony Liv. This initial frenzy clashed with the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. While the pandemic had far-reaching consequences across production, distribution, and exhibition (see Chatterjee 2022), it did trigger a momentous rise in subscription rates to streaming platforms. One of the pandemic’s significant effects on India’s media industries was to bring big-budget commercial films to a direct-to-platform release model. India’s most successful streaming platform, Disney + Hotstar, with 56.6 million paid subscribers (Pinto 2023), came up with a catchy new moniker for this model: Disney + Hotstar Multiplex. It promised “First Day, First Show, Home Delivery” (first day, first show, home delivered). Shah Rukh Khan, King of Bollywood, appeared in a series of comic advertisements with his secretary mocking him for losing out on the Hotstar pie when all his co-actors were already on board. In one of these advertisements, Khan appears with Anurag Kashyap. Kashyap is co-director of Netflix’s critically acclaimed Sacred Games (2018–2019) and one of Bombay’s most prominent contemporary directors. He is lauded for bringing a grittier, more realistic vocabulary to popular Hindi cinema in the last decade. This juxtaposition of Khan—the icon of popular and global Bollywood—with Kashyap—a signifier of the alternative within the mainstream—is telling.

In this ad, playfully titled Thoda Rukh Shah Rukh (Wait a Little, Shah Rukh, 2022), Khan pretends to launch his own OTT app, SRK + and has seemingly hired Kashyap to generate content ideas. “Bol Anurag, SRK+ ke liye ideas” (Give me some ideas for SRK+, Anurag) begins Khan. “Sir, Mumbai city! Deadly serial killers, and an ever-deadlier cop!” narrates Kashyap. “Wow, Superhit!” exclaims Khan. “It’s already a superhit, Rudra, on Disney+Hotstar,” quickly adds the deadpan secretary. As the ad proceeds, we see that most of Kashyap’s unique ideas have already been made into shows and films for Hotstar. What’s left for SRK+? Seemingly, nothing. Khan is the owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders, an Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket team, and even their games are broadcast live on Hotstar. Hiring Shah Rukh Khan for a satirical campaign for a streaming platform offers important clues for how the digital economy, media creatives, and the media alliances associated with them can be imagined in India. It also underlines the range of media capital that has begun to circulate on platforms and how media industries theorize themselves in this moment. Streaming platforms are not only spaces for prestige storytelling and long-form television—or the Anurag Kashyaps of Bombay—but also a site for an intermedial and multimodal reconfiguration of the intensely commercial and popular.

How do key players in Bombay’s screen industries—producers, directors, writers, and business developers—understand, imagine, plan, and navigate the dizzying new world of streaming platforms in India? Following a critical media industry studies approach, this article tracks the emergence of symbiotic relationships between new streaming platforms and established film and television professionals in Bombay. Streaming platforms are producing and addressing new taste cultures through strategic accumulation of new and existing creative labor and channeling them into new cultures of professionalization with positions like “showrunner,” “creative producer,” and “head of content,” along with an introduction of globally streamlined media work cultures like “writer’s rooms” that were unheard of even five years ago. However, those associated with India’s streaming platforms lead multiple media lives: coming from long histories of film and television and continuing to work in these adjacent industries alongside developing, commissioning, writing, producing, and directing “content” for new platforms. How do these creative economies feed into each other? How do media workers theorize themselves in a moment of change? How do they imagine the country’s new digital audience and the possibilities of a new televisual aesthetic? Drawing upon semi-structured interviews with various media professionals, discourse analysis, and participant observation, this article sketches a preliminary picture of this industrial restructuring to show how certain kinds of media migrations (from television to platform, film to platform, social media to platform, and journalism and advertising to platform) are regulating value, socio-cultural capital, and segregated taste cultures in the Indian streaming market.

The current digital moment, however, must be understood in relation to the historic regimes of value and taste in Bombay’s media industries. Tejaswini Ganti’s (2012) work on the social and cultural world of Bombay’s filmmakers offers significant insights into how value and prestige have been historically understood in this mass-media industry. Ganti (2012, 7) argues that we cannot separate filmmakers’ subjectivities and sentiments from the political economy of media cultures, as they “operate as a form of boundary-work, which serves to create alternate regimes of value and criteria of prestige that are independent of commercial outcome. ¹ ” The granting of industry status to Bollywood in 1998 and the subsequent corporatization did create new work cultures that privileged specific creative skills and expertise. However, as Ganti (2012, 10) astutely notes, “making films for millions (or even billions of people) involves the deployment of ideas and understandings about pleasure, desire, affect, morality, subjectivity, and social identity.” Streaming platforms in India tap into the labor of the same creatives who have been working in the industry for the last two to three decades and bring with them distinctive and generative ideas about value, the rhythms of media work, and the audience tastes they seek to address. Crucially, they have unique conjectures about their role in the new streaming economy.

Streaming platforms have, however, engendered new forms of strategic hiring that may well go on to define industrial boundaries and structures in the next decade. For instance, director-producer Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, an enormously successful production studio known for its extravagant big-budget commercial Bollywood films, has in the last five years made two strategic hires for their digital arm, Dharmatic Entertainment. Johar has long been entrenched in Bombay’s kinship-based industrial networks, inheriting the studio from his father, Yash Johar. ² However, in employing creative personnel for his streaming ventures, Johar chose to look outside his established networks. He also brokered a deal with Netflix, where most of his new digital shows and films would be housed, creating a horizontal alliance between two global media brands. As Head of Content, he hired Somen Mishra, a former entertainment journalist who migrated from a lesser-known production startup, Junglee Productions. Mishra is an outsider to Bollywood’s familial networks and thinks of his work at Dharmatic/Dharma Productions as that of leading its 2.0 version, characterized by a “shift in content strategy” and “bridging the gap between Versova and Bandra” (Mishra 2020). This elicitation of two Bombay neighborhoods is an industry code that will only be legible to those familiar with how the value-based locations of its creative workers intertwine with the city’s geography and its real estate market. “Versova” is a signifier for struggling writers and small production houses catering to niche tastes trying to get a foothold in the industry, while “Bandra” connotes economic success, old kinship-based networks, stars, and an overall sense of having arrived. Mishra now positions himself as a champion of outsiders finding a space within media worlds that were formerly closed to them.

Johar’s second strategic hire is Aneesha Baig, Creative Head of Non-Fiction. She is a former journalist with one of India’s major English news channels, NDTV. To Baig’s credit is the much-discoursed reality show, Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives (2022). Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives (2020–present) is a multimodal show that draws as much from global reality television as it does from Johar’s own social capital in Bombay and his long-standing work as host of the celebrity talk show Koffee with Karan. Thus, while these new strategic hires from industries like journalism and advertising help in recalibrating the directions toward which a production company with an established brand recall can go, they cannot entirely override Dharma’s trademark tonality, visual style, or aesthetics. Simultaneously, an alliance with a global cosmopolitan prestige platform like Netflix does generate desires to “cross-pollinate” with the “other” of Bombay’s media geography and produce new hybrid economies of taste. This time, it is not box office success that underwrites creative decisions, but a desire to accumulate Netflix’s global cultural capital and affectively participate in its economy of “pop cosmopolitanism”—a popular culture-induced awareness of the world beyond one’s national borders (Jenkins 2004, in Elkins 2019). As was also evident in the Hotstar advertisement with Shah Rukh Khan (most often a YRF and Dharma star who lives in Bandra) and Anurag Kashyap (whose maiden production company Phantom Films was housed in a small Versova office), value—as a creative property—now resides with those who can quickly and predictively narrowcast. In Johar’s (2021) words:

I am of the belief that in this digital era, writing is of such prominence because the digital era is predominantly a writer’s medium. The concept of “commercial,” the concept of what we know as “mass” and “mainstream,” has been evolving and drastically changing. Because when we say, “Oh, it’s a masala film” or “it’s a mass film,” and we’ll just do it because apparently there is a mass section that will love it, I think we are second-guessing people who have moved on. They’ve moved on and some of us are still stuck there.

Therefore, the arrival of streaming and its quick collision with the pandemic have indeed led to some fractures in “industry common sense” (Havens et al. 2009). As Benjamin Burroughs argues in the American context (2019, 3), streaming creates a “moment of disjuncture,” which leads to a re-articulation of industry lore. To be clear, like elsewhere, the presence of big data and burgeoning algorithmic cultures have not wiped out the existing hierarchies and prevalent considerations of taste, prestige, and value-generation in Bombay. The picture that emerges is of an industry in dynamic transit where multiple players can hold the key. In what follows, I discuss a few other prominent industry figures—Varun Grover (writer and executive producer of India’s first Netflix Original Sacred Games), Ekta Kapoor (one of Bombay’s most influential television producers from the mid-1990s and founder of local platform Alt Balaji), and the two heads of Sony Liv, Danish Khan, and Ashish Golwalkar. Each of them is associated in various capacities with major streaming platforms, both global and local: Netflix, Alt Balaji, and Sony Liv. They are also established figures with deep roots in film and television who have semi-migrated to streaming platforms. Their self-reflexivity and theorizations about the industry-in-digital-transit help us not only grasp the heterogeneity of this moment but also trace notions of value and taste in Bombay’s emerging digital media ecologies as understood by those who are shaping them. While Grover embodies the growing importance of the long-form prestige writer, Kapoor’s platform addresses the diversity of local tastes and gears itself toward new audiences in established media regions, creating new overlays between television and digital. Sony Liv, a platform run by old-timers from television, looks back at the national family-oriented Doordarshan era of Indian TV—before the arrival of cable and satellite—for its streaming endeavors. These case studies thus allow us to trace the multiple linkages between contemporary streaming cultures and the structural histories of both film and television on the subcontinent. Such insights into the world of media professionals—the ways in which they locate their work and their industrial legacies within Bombay’s streaming maps—are also elemental to the processes of cultural legitimation of new streaming tastes and the reconfigurations of the relationships between texts, industries, and audiences.

Varun Grover: Media Maverick

Varun Grover, in many ways, embodies the new industry lore around the rise of the (prestige) writer in Bollywood. This is significant in a male-star-driven industry notorious for not having bound scripts, and several instances of scenes and dialogues often written on set. Grover is a comedian, a lyricist, and a screenwriter, often commenting on the country’s socio-political realities through satire. He also gave the countrywide Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act ³ protests (against the BJP government) a powerful slogan, “hum kaagaz nahi dikhayenge” (we won’t show any papers). In a recent Netflix film, Qala (2022), Grover’s acting debut, he plays a version of himself, a lyricist called Majrooh (after Majrooh Sultanpuri, a renowned left-leaning Urdu poet-lyricist from the 1950s and 1960s). Qala, set in the 1930s, chronicles the traumatic rise and death of the eponymous character, a female playback singer working in the Hindi-Urdu film industry. In a scene from this film, Majrooh presents his new song lyrics to an unscrupulous producer, who says, “It’s too complex and poetic. Write something easy.” This is a layered scene that offers insights into three significant historic and contemporary industrial dynamics: it is a remark on the long-standing conflict between the commercial producer and the writer-artist, a sardonic nod to Grover’s own position in the industry, and finally, as a Netflix film, it indicates the platform’s “benevolent” support of the prestige writer in Bombay. The platform thus offers itself up as a third interstitial space beside film and television, ready to absorb those talented creatives who could not get their rightful due in the industry as-is.

In August 2019, I met Grover at a popular café in Versova, a few months after the critical and commercial success of Netflix’s first Indian original, Sacred Games, of which he is both Head Writer and Executive Producer. The show is an adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s novel of the same name. This café was in proximity to Versova’s cluster of production houses and casting studios. Grover was clearly an aspirational figure for the trying-to-make-it creatives, with multiple people interrupting our conversation to pay their respects. He had already written several popular songs for Anurag Kashyap’s films, and the critically acclaimed Indo-French indie Masaan (2015) was now well-known in the city’s alternative-within-the-mainstream film circles. The Sacred Games project came to him in the usual ad hoc way in which work circulates in Bombay, with the series co-director and showrunner Vikramaditya Motwane suggesting his name to Netflix.

Initially, Grover was hesitant to take on the project because crime was not his genre. On Motwane’s insistence, he started reading the novel and found several elements in it that he could work with, particularly the political and contemporary history of the country, reading the show’s genre as “crime comma drama and not crime hyphen drama” (Grover 2019). After Grover agreed to come on board, he followed the Netflix-mandated global work processes. He formed a writer’s room with Vasant Nag and Smita Singh for Season 1 and remained on the team for Season 2 with a different set of writers. They spent a few months reading and discussing the novel, selecting the characters they wanted in the show and writing their journeys, eventually deciding on the episode structures. After spending a couple of months on episode breakdowns, the writers had a document known as the Netflix Bible—with characters, episodes, plot points, and overall themes—which was then sent to the Netflix offices in Los Angeles for approval. After getting the company nod, the writers divided the episodes among themselves, with Grover writing two crucial episodes: the pilot and the finale. His pilot became the pitch document for the entire cast and crew, including the actors and the director of photography, thus setting the show’s total etymology. As Grover (2019) put it, “basis that, Netflix got excited that the vision is right, there is a clear path ahead, and that’s it. After that, it was just the manual labor of writing” (Grover 2019, translated from Hindi by the author).

Grover draws the lineage of Sacred Games to Bombay’s “great gangster films”—Parinda (1989), Satya (1998), and Gangs of Wasseypur (2012)—rather than international crime dramas. “Writing hum ne bahut Hindustani rakhi (we kept the writing very Indian),” says Grover while asserting that it was the director’s job to ensure other elements like production design and acting styles (more realism) spoke to Netflix’s televisuality. Reflecting upon a collective creative aspiration to belong to the visual landscape of global cosmopolitanism espoused by Netflix at large, Grover said:

There should be no dumbing down of any element or cutting corners. The show was shot in 4K; it should not look like it was made on a lower budget because it’s from India. We wanted it to be as good as any international show on the Netflix homepage alongside twenty other shows from twenty countries, so we wanted to be of that quality (2019).

Grover contends that he would not have written a show for streaming had it not been for Netflix. The platform’s brand value and prestige were instrumental in his decision. He would have considered Amazon Prime Video too, indicating that these global platforms are the ones who experiment with their televisuality and, importantly, give due credit to writers—something he misses in film, and especially Indian cinema. In a film, “writer ki voice sabse upar nahin hoti (A writer’s voice is not on top),” but in a prestige television format, the showrunner and writer bind all the diverse material together. This new opportunity for unprecedented creative control was a clincher for Grover. Speaking disparagingly about Indian television, Grover called it “all noise. It has no point” and was clear that he would not have considered reading the novel had the project come to him from a local platform (Grover 2019).

Unlike producers like Karan Johar and Ekta Kapoor, Grover says he rarely makes calculations about audience tastes. This was a the first instance of a media creative in Bombay eschewing thoughts about the audience and their likes and dislikes. “Meri audience, hamesha main hi hota hoon. Main aur soch hi nahi sakta. It will be humorous to think that I know what people at large want (I am always my own audience). I cannot think further,” said Grover, underscoring that he only writes for his taste palette—things that he can watch and like. He continues, “I write only those kinds of films and those kinds of shows where there is a new world revealed to the people and there is some insight about our times or our human condition” (2019). Netflix shared no data with the writers of Sacred Games, despite them asking for some indicators to help gage the show’s reception, especially internationally. Their affirmation came in the form of greenlighting the second season of the show and retaining Grover as head writer, in tandem with Netflix’s global policy of marking itself as a space for “complex” television (Burroughs 2019; for a Mexican case study, see Llamas-Rodriguez 2020). Since Sacred Games, Grover has worked on several other Netflix India projects, including penning several hit songs from the recent neo-noir (and most-watched Netflix India film) Monica, O My Darling (2022) and Qala (2022).

Ekta Kapoor: The World Between Narcos and Naagin ⁴

Ekta Kapoor is one of South Asia’s most prominent and powerful producers. In a career spanning almost three decades, Kapoor has produced numerous successful soap operas that flooded Indian television from the late 1990s to the present, a wide variety of commercial films, and now heads a streaming platform that launched sixty-nine original shows in five short years. She is currently Managing Director and Creative Head of Balaji Telefilms Limited, the parent company of Balaji Motion Pictures and Alt Balaji (the streaming platform). Her long-running soap operas, often starting with the letter K—her lucky alphabet—have been mocked, criticized for their regressive politics, and now endlessly mined for memes and Instagram reels. Often going over 1,000 episodes, these television soaps usually promoted a seamless blend of Hinduism and capitalism, replete with self-sacrificing wives, evil mothers-in-law, vamps, multiple time skips, characters returning from the dead, and more recently, shape-shifting serpents and black magic. As one journalist writes, “By the mid-2000s, almost half of the top ten shows on television were Balaji products. Ekta’s only competition was Ekta” (Gulati 2016). While Kapoor’s extraordinary television profits have rested on formulas to “maximize viewership” (Gulati 2016), her foray into film production has belied such neat categorization. She has backed low-budget feminist films like Lipstick Under My Burkha (2017), along with new experimental genres like Love, Sex, aur Dhoka (2010), Ragini MMS (2011), The Dirty Picture (2011), and Udta Punjab (2016) (for which Varun Grover stepped in as lyricist). With her streaming platform, Alt Balaji, Kapoor faces a different criticism—albeit still ensconced in class-based taste politics—that her streaming shows are too risqué and, once again, in bad taste.

Addressing these criticisms, Kapoor (2020) said, “I really don’t care if South Bombay watches my show or not. I am very happy that from Vashi to Bihar, everyone has Alt Balaji on their phone.” Like Somen Mishra’s statement about Bandra and Versova as signifiers of two related but distinct media geographies, Kapoor’s too evokes a place to connect audiences and tastes. Notably, this challenges Netflix’s narrative of global cosmopolitan “taste clusters” delinked from demographic identity (Elkins 2019). Kapoor’s assertion sheds light on several key aspects of the Venn Diagram within which a “local” streaming platform operates. Kapoor and Alt Balaji have homegrown parameters for measuring audiences, class-based taste cultures, media geographies, and the technological and infrastructural capacities of their app users. The platform seeks to capitalize upon existing media regions that have a “strong Balaji recall.” The usage of place names like Vashi (a dense Mumbai suburb) and Bihar (a populous state with large rural pockets) and the evocation of the mobile phone are important indicators of the platform’s targeted and imagined audiences. Reflecting on the thoroughly segregated nature of media tastes in the same household, Kapoor (2020) links her platform directly to her legacy in television and says:

I have one TV in the house, I have four family members and I will give the remote to my mother or my wife (if I’m an Indian man in Tier 2 or Tier 3) and if I want to watch action, my mother is sitting there, and my daughter is sitting there. I cannot watch it. Same for me. I am a 17-year-old girl watching a soap opera with my mother. I hate and curse Ekta Kapoor every day for making the same shows with the same story styles. I want to see girls who rebel. I want to see girls like me. In this format: small town, small city. And then comes the young boy who says I want to have entertainment, comedy, edgy, slightly sexual, slightly fun—what I can talk to my friends and share. All these various tastes TV does not take care of. Because TV is like. . . I call it the Diwali of content. You know, when Diwali comes, we wear Indian clothes, we sit with our family, and we talk differently. We are very different when we are with our friends. When I’m alone, I want to live out my darker side. I don’t want to watch it with others. That taste is what I try to cater to with Alt Balaji.

Unlike prestige-platform shows like Sacred Games, which propelled a critical discourse among critics, audiences, social media influencers, and the national and international press, Alt Balaji’s gamut of shows usually passes without significant comment or critical attention. Kapoor’s own position within India’s media history continues to dictate the politics of value associated with her streaming platform. She believes that despite the presence of a few “prestige-like” shows on Alt Balaji (Bose: Dead/Alive 2017, Mission Over Mars 2019), digital audiences still choose to watch prestige TV on Netflix/Amazon Prime Video and “massy” sexual content on Alt Bajali. “The more I am going into Tier 2 and Tier 3, the masala content is working better on my app. What can I do? But of course, it’s great fun to talk about an Indian app and then nicely diss it by saying, Oh, it’s all sexual” (Kapoor 2020).

In a 2019 interview with a film critic, Kapoor discussed her everyday creative process. She feels she has an “instinct” with the audience because she has been in the business for twenty-four years through “multiple touchpoints.” Every show is narrated to Kapoor, during which she quickly scans for the “weak spots,” eschewing scripts that are “too television” and “too unidentifiable.” She does eight scripts a day and does not want to be known as the poorer cousin of the global platforms, trying to match volume with quantity. In 2019, Alt Balaji had 107 shows in development, each with its own writer’s room. She has moved her focus from detailing television episodes to detailing her streaming shows, which includes determining the narrative arc and approving the final edit. Unlike the creation of a series bible that other platforms follow, Kapoor considers her long experience in the industry to be an intuitive meta-bible. Her television shows ran on existing prime-time channels and unlike platforms launched by Zee TV and Star TV, Kapoor did not have a ready library for her streaming platform. “I need the stickiness of television and the start to finish of a film”, said Kapoor (2019b), explaining that she understands streaming as essentially a hybrid format. What sets this format apart, for her, is a sense of completion (like film) that Indian television rarely offers.

Alt Balaji saw a 42 percent increase in subscriptions during the peak phases of the pandemic from 2020 to 2021. It is currently available in seventy countries. The platform’s estimated number of subscriptions by the end of 2025 is 40 million. Forty percent of the platform’s audiences are between 18 and 24, with a skewed gender ratio: 65.40 percent are male and 35 percent of subscribers are female (Elad 2023). Kapoor has partnered with another domestic television giant, Zee TV’s streaming platform, Zee 5. Together, they have co-produced ten shows. Zee 5 has a stronger female audience base than Alt, and Kapoor hopes that this partnership will attract more women to her platform. Alt Balaji’s most watched shows, as listed on their website, are XXX: Uncensored (2018–2019) and Gandii Baat (2018–present), both of which are erotic shows. Gandii Baat was also the most popular streaming show among Indian men (Ormax Media, 2019). Zee 5 initially opted to host both shows on their platform but eventually removed them due to “obscenity.”

Alt Balaji offers a unique feature: the ability to rent some shows without paying full subscription fees. Despite these numbers, Kapoor asserts that a politics of brazen elitism still dictates the industry and particularly the discourse associated with her ventures: “I feel elite India does not understand mass India.” Her niche is clear (Kapoor 2019a):

Between rural and urban is a huge audience called the urban mass, which is what I’m actually catering to. Urban mass is the world between Netflix and Naagin. This means I’m not the Naagin audience, but I can’t watch Narcos either because I’ve not learned English in the best school. This is a huge 30–40, maybe 60 million base. And they’re from cities like Mumbai and Delhi. Mumbai is not south Bombay only; it’s also Vashi, Andheri, and a little bit of Nagpur.

Kapoor locates the current digital turn within the longer history of satellite television and globalization in India. Here, it is important to briefly revisit the transformations unleashed by the mega success of Kapoor’s longest-running serial, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because Mother-in-Law was Once a Daughter-in-Law). This soap ran for eight years (2000–2008), across 1,833 episodes, and turned Kapoor and her production company into household names. Moving the prime-time slot to late evening (10 to 11 PM) was an immensely profitable move, with the show crossing all TRP markers previously set on Indian television and even overtaking cricket (Chougule 2009). Kapoor’s template for fiction TV determined much of what post-globalization television in India came to represent and brought immense fame for their female protagonists. This subsequently translated into political popularity for many, especially the protagonist of Kyunki, Smriti Irani, currently one of the BJP’s (Bhartiya Janta Party’s) top leaders. It gave Kapoor and her company insights into the consumption patterns of multiple media regions in South Asia. Connecting contemporary questions around changing viewing habits and the audience’s capacity to pay for streaming, Kapoor (2020) notes, “When Kyunki came in 2000, I remember the same questions were being asked of me. How the hell will people pay 250 rupees for cable and satellite when they get Doordarshan for free? And I was like people will pay; for content, people will pay. Sometimes content builds technology, sometimes technology builds content.” Balaji Telefilms’ hegemonic template for primetime television precluded a plethora of audience desires and tastes. Kapoor addresses this self-made lacuna on television through a platform literally titled Alt Balaji, both catering to and producing an audience in-between mass-market fantasy and prestige television. It can be read as a space for generating parallel visions of televisual modernity within India’s streaming economy that exist despite and outside of Netflix-led hierarchies of “global taste,” legitimizing “lowbrow” pleasures for those digital audiences who are seeking them.

Sony Liv: The New Doordarshan?

Sony Liv can best be described as a streaming platform with high aspirations for “cerebral television” but without the algorithmic resources of the likes of Netflix. It is owned by Culver Max Entertainment, a media conglomerate operating in India since 1995 that currently owns and operates twenty-six television channels besides this digital platform. Sony Liv thus fundamentally draws on their long association with satellite television in India, with its precedents being Sony Entertainment Television (SET), Sony Max, Sony Pix, and a few sports channels. In September 2021, Sony Pictures merged with Zee Entertainment, combining their “linear networks, digital assets, production operations, and program libraries” (CNBCTV18, 2022). This represents a major merger among two prominent domestic media giants, like Disney’s association with Hotstar (also see Punathambekar and Kumar 2022).

Sony Liv is India’s first streaming platform, launching in 2015 with a library of their existing television shows and then again in 2020 with a significant foray into original programing. Their breakout hit—and entry into the public discourse on new taste cultures via streaming—was a show called Scam 1992 (2020). This show, termed a “financial thriller,” chronicled the rise and fall of Harshad Mehta, a notorious stockbroker who committed one of India’s most infamous financial scams, when the country was on the brink of privatization and liberalization. Scam 1992, despite being replete with stock market jargon and ten lengthy hour-long episodes, was nonetheless a critical and commercial success for the platform, becoming their most watched show and propelling Sony Liv into a relatively uncrowded space: a domestic platform with a massive indigenous library from satellite television, which simultaneously offers a distinctive new voice for prestige television—attracting film directors like Hansal Mehta, Imitiaz Ali (Dr. Arora 2022), and Vishal Bharadwaj (Charlie Chopra & The Mystery of Solang Valley 2023)—representing a taste cluster that would usually be associated with global platforms.

As of March 2023, the platform had 24.4 million paid subscribers. It has multiple subscription options, including a yearly mobile-only plan for 599 INR and monthly premium plans starting at 299 INR. In July 2022, I met Danish Khan, Business Head, and Ashish Golwalkar, Head of Content, at the sprawling Sony Liv offices in the Bombay suburb of Malad, to piece together how they theorize this platform within the larger OTT constellation. Both Khan and Golwalkar had established and long-running careers in television before moving to a digital platform. Both had worked across multiple aspects of channels like Sony and Star TV Networks, ranging from business development to marketing and programing. In fact, Khan is working simultaneously in television, studio (for films), and digital. Discussing the key differences between the three sectors, Khan shed light on the economies of subscription around which television and digital platforms are organized in India. Television is still widely dependent on a “trickling effect,” where a small portion of the consumer’s spending reaches the broadcaster. With digital, after taxes, the platforms gain the entire subscription amount. Indian cable television, according to Khan (2022), structurally precludes the possibility of “good content”:

The longer you play, the more profitable you are so the main thing is to stretch it and focus on characters and plots rather than the overall story. You are also looking at a larger set of audience and you are not getting an accurate measurement. A trickle of that money comes to you, so the sharpness of the story reduces. Television is unlimited fiction, and a movie is about 100–150 minutes of story. When we talk about digital or web series, there are 400–600 minutes of content.

To tap into the hyperactivity that is characteristic of a digital audience and to distinguish themselves in the streaming marketplace, both Khan and Golwalkar emphasized that Sony Liv’s niche was “cerebral entertainment” and “Indian stories.” They wanted to eschew remakes of foreign shows and avoid what was happening on American, Korean, or Turkish television. Khan (2022) elaborates:

The story should be Indian. By deciding that our stories will be Indian, our inspiration is more about what has happened to India. Right now, if you look, there are a lot of stories we are looking at that are contemporary in India. It is 1947–early 2000s. We are telling a lot of stories from contemporary history and from Indian literature.

This is evocative of Doordarshan’s national programing in the 1980s, when television became a common object in middle-class homes (see Mankekar 1999; Singhal and Rogers 1988, Kumar 2010); a focus on family dramas, historicals, everyday middle-class struggles, and tales of heroic national achievement. Sony Liv’s other major successes, Rocket Boys (2022–2023), an account of the lives of nuclear scientists Homi J. Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai as entwined with a newly independent nation’s scientific ambitions, and the three seasons of Gullak (2019–2023), centered on the quotidian and often comic struggles of a middle-class family in a small North Indian town, are reminiscent of Doordarshan’s blend of entertainment and social messaging. Their understanding of big data and algorithmic cultures is also distinctive, as Khan (2022) explained:

As a platform, we do not directly use data to design our programming. Unlike some other platforms that think they are tech platforms, we believe that we are content makers at their core. Core is content and ultimately, we respect the imagination of creative people more than data.

Importantly, Sony Liv does not have personalized predictive engines like Netflix. Everyone sees the same interface on the platform. Golwalker (2022) believes India’s digital market is still too nascent for data-led programing: “We are too early, the entire industry. You need to have a critical mass of content and viewership for AI to start predicting. Total addressable paid subscriptions in India are at 40 million; chaar crore mein kya data?” (What data do we need for just 40 million?). Together, Khan and Golwalkar list the various ways in which the platform measures its success: the number of unique subscribers a show can “pull,” along with those who remain and renew their subscriptions. This is then compared to those who “sampled” the show, the time they spent watching it, and the completion rates. Finally, social media chatter and “how many memes are made on the content are, in my opinion, a big meter. If people are creating memes, they are noticing you.”

Sony Liv’s audience displays a startling gender gap: over 80 percent of its subscribers are male. Khan and Golwalkar assert that this is an industry-wide trend, speculating that Netflix India perhaps has only 15 percent female subscribers. They also cite the generic dominance of crime and thrillers on OTT platforms as the reason for their heavy male-dominated viewership. Khan, however (and perhaps in a light dig toward Alt Balaji), asserts that the platform will never make shows “that you can’t watch with your family,” thus undermining the cult of the individual viewer who prefers privatized risqué shows. Golwalkar also adds an important caveat: “When a person buys, if it’s not a mobile-only pack, it is consumed by the entire family.” This is unique to the Indian context, where the mobile phone—otherwise understood as a personal device—is often shared by multiple family members. ⁵ Among other shows, Sony Liv is currently developing an ambitious adaptation of Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s novel Freedom at Midnight (1975), a detailed chronicle of the last two years of the British Raj in India, leading up to Partition.

Conclusion: Streaming and the Concentric Media Lives of Film and Television

In this article, I have sketched a preliminary picture of India’s nascent streaming industries—focusing on taste clusters and audience imaginations—through the perspectives of a host of media professionals who are shaping the terrain. While my work looks at Bombay, future research will no doubt study streaming cultures and creative industries in other major Indian media capitals like Calcutta, Chennai, and Hyderabad. Streaming platforms—both global and local—seek media creatives who can bring their preexisting social and cultural capital to them. Such industrial restructuring is based on a symbiotic relationship between historic regimes of value and new platform economies, which in turn engender new taste clusters and audience imaginations.

The Indian scenario, however, is uniquely placed at the intersection of both film and television. Unlike the United States and other parts of the world, India’s streaming trajectory—especially in the domains of taste, capital, and value—does not directly follow television but evokes another path. ⁶ Notably, post-liberalization, Indian satellite television did not have an HBO equivalent. In other words, cable television in India, unlike its neighbor Pakistan, had no “golden age” of critically acclaimed shows. This led to a paucity of writers well versed in long-form prestige television with character-driven, novelistic arcs with definite beginnings and endings. Therefore, the cultural capital associated with alternative-within-the-mainstream film writers and lyricists like Varun Grover is unique and prized in the Indian streaming economy. Netflix chief Ted Sarandos’s much-quoted line about wanting to become HBO sooner than HBO could become them (in Syme 2023) and more recently, Beja Bajaria’s (Head of Global Television) assertion that the platform seeks to “replace all television” (2023), thus cannot be neatly transposed to the Indian context. This, despite the platform’s recent move toward the commercially popular and keenness to follow the established routes of global television formats, which have previously been successful on Indian television (examples include adaptations of Ugly Betty and reality shows like Big Brother and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?). What we are seeing instead is a large—but largely floating and impermanent—migration of film workers to digital platforms, reminiscent of the 1980s, when many media creatives associated with film took up jobs in television as they found their creative expressions thwarted in both mainstream and state-sponsored art cinema (Gopal 2019; Singhal et al. 1988). For instance, Netflix India recently remade the Spanish series Elite (2018) as Class (2023–present) and chose indie film director Ashim Ahluwalia to helm it. Thus, for global platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, the regimes of value and taste cultures associated with the likes of film creatives like Varun Grover, Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Karan Johar, Hansal Mehta, and Vishal Bharadwaj translate into cultural capital for the platforms they migrate to, forging a new intermediality between popular cinema and digital, which in turn is shaping its televisuality. For several film workers across all departments—long accustomed to Bombay’s ad-hoc and disorganized work cultures and the limitations of commercial cinema—global streaming platforms bring opportunities for a plethora of new jobs along with training in new technical and management skills. As the co-director and showrunner of Sacred Games, Vikramaditya Motwane said, before helming this show, he had never had a “Showrunner” as a production job (Motwane 2019).

However, as far as taste cultures and Indian audiences are concerned, a different story emerges from India’s immensely successful local platforms: Alt Balaji, Zee5, Sony Liv, and Disney + Hotstar, among others. In a recent article discussing Disney + Hotstar—a platform with a vast library from their satellite television housed under the Star TV Network—and its audience imaginaries, Shanti Kumar and Aswin Punathambekar (2022) argue that access to unprecedented granular viewer data has only deepened the crisis about making assumptions about audiences. Despite initial marketing toward the individual viewer (Go Solo), Hotstar soon pivoted to evoking the social life of television in its advertising campaigns. “By 2016, Hotstar’s imagination of the digital audience came full circle with a series of ads that situated viewers firmly within the boundaries of the national community—“One India, Happy Together” (Ek India, Happywala) (ibid., 343, 2022). Similarly, as Sony Liv’s choice of shows underlines, the old television dictum of seeking “family audiences”—despite the prevalence of mobile phones—remains a central force and one via which it seeks to distinguish itself from more individual viewer-oriented platforms like Netflix and Alt Balaji. While Ekta Kapoor’s long and immensely profitable experiments with satellite television may have led to a disparaging public discourse around her streaming platform, ultimately, Alt Balaji’s success has hinged on harnessing the structural life of television in terms of audience segmentation and a privileging of existing hyper-local media regions that already have affective convergences with her television brand (also true of cable television giants like Sony, Zee, and Star TV). Thus, the Indian streaming economy cannot be understood via overarching American discourses about “cord cutters” or an annihilation of paying television audiences in the country. According to a report by the consultancy firm KPMG, television audiences in India were estimated at 900 million (as opposed to 450–500 million digital audiences) in 2022. Only 0.2% (0.5 million) of this market were cord cutters. Because streaming platform subscriptions cost at least three-to-four times that of cable television, India is unlikely to witness large-scale cord-cutting in the coming years (Best MediaInfo Bureau 2022). Therefore, robust programing for satellite and cable television continues to exist alongside new digital offerings. While successful television producers like Ekta Kapoor, among others, are creating new programing to cater to the evolving tastes of digital viewers, they are ultimately seen as a distinct category from established and emergent television markets. New digital audiences nonetheless emerge from the same media regions that have long been seen as television strongholds, yet streaming does not seek to replace linear television. The Indian streaming economy thus derives from both film and television: while film influences the televisuality of streaming, television structures continue to guide audience segmentation, platform pricing, and programing for linguistic media regions. Therefore, the current processes of industrial restructuring offer insights into the multiple and overlapping ways in which both media creatives and audience segments from film and television are being reconfigured and reimagined for the new streaming economy.