Sameer Nair - The Storyteller

Yes, now there is a whole range of OTT platforms coming up, just like how satellite television was in the early 1990s and 2000s. There is a lot of interest in the market, lot of new players are getting in, there’s competition, the market is growing, the audience is growing, there are many ideas... in entertainment, business models succeed and fail primarily basis audience appreciation.

In the early ’90s, when the television business was being built; we were creating content, but at the same time, we were also laying cables for distribution. In the OTT world, distribution is already in place – of a billion homes, 400 million have got access to high speed internet, screens already exist. In fact, content is playing catch up to distribution.

YouTube has 300 million monthly active users, so the audience is already there. In the television business, there was no audience back then.

There are three ways: social chatter, the feedback we get from platforms, and the real litmus test – the opportunity to make a second season.

I’ve always been a storyteller, be it in advertising, television or in the studio business. There’s the creative part of it and then there is commerce. It is not art for art’s sake or art for commerce’s sake; it’s actually art for applause, appreciation and acclaim. Eventually, the result is some sort of commercial benefit for all stakeholders. There are producers investing in the shows, so it is important to not lose money. It is called showbiz or show business, after all.

Also, I am drawn to entrepreneurial ideas, building teams from scratch, and then creating the business brick by brick, I like doing it.

The model is new for the market. It’s exciting. It’s like a hybrid movie model. Historically, studios have been making films that have been financed in different ways - pre-sell, studio finance, raising money to make films and then selling different rights. It’s a globally established model that we’ve brought to the drama series business. In a sense, we look at drama series as cinematic television.

We, at Applause, have produced 15 shows so far, of which 10 have been licensed/sold. There are around nine more shows, at various stages of postproduction.

The West evolved differently, not just on the tech front... even content. In the West, there was a lot of premium drama on television. We, in India, missed that moment. The West always had their studios and production companies, and they have always created this kind of content. There, the audience simply moved from consuming it on linear television to digital. For them, a Netflix is not an invention of content as much it is an invention of distribution.

India never had that kind of premium cinematic television, because we got into daily soaps. That is the need gap we’ve spotted. No one can come here and buy a big library for this gap... it doesn’t exist.

There is risk involved in what we do. So far, we have been commissioning shows on our own. We collaborate with content creators and talk to the platforms after the show is made. For second seasons of shows, we collaborate with the creator and the platform.

Unfortunately, no. But that’s fair... because platforms have a business to run. They have large overhead costs and operating expenses. So, if we are creating a show and licensing it to a platform, exclusively, for a certain period of time, there is a premium on that and then they monetise it. When they monetise, it becomes a basket of programming for a basket of revenue. A consumer who buys a monthly subscription never buys a show; he/she buys the service. Some shows do well, some don’t.

Many big TV shows are adaptations – ‘KBC’ is an adaptation, ‘Bigg Boss’ is a remake. The Americans do it all the time; the famous ‘Homeland’ is an adaptation of an Israeli show, ‘The Office’ is an adaptation of a British show. I don’t think there is any other country where they get caught up in this who ‘Oh but why can’t you do originals’ thing. I think it’s a very facile argument. Adapting something is extremely difficult... if you do it badly, or if you do not make your own, enough to resonate with your audience, it is not going to succeed.

Also, it is better to legitimately adopt than rip off, which so much of my community does all the time in any case. The American ‘Office’ is my favourite show and we are very proud that we could make the Indian version. When we made KBC (Star, 2000), we never messed around with it. I started the show 19-20 years ago and just a couple of days back, I saw a lady win a crore. It is still the same show.

This does not mean adaptations are an easier sell. Finally, you still have to tell a great story, you still have to cast it, and then adapt it so the whole process has to be repeated.

No, we did not discuss ‘The Office’ with Hotstar before it was made. It was a show that had to be made and we did it. And we can do in the future too.

There is a huge, hungry audience of about 500 million, as per our last count, and it is growing. Obviously television has fatigued... it is not dying, but is slowing down. This whole thing about binge viewing, new stories and new genres is catching up. It is a lot more individualistic, on-demand viewing. We will see all sorts of stories being thrown at this audience, both adaptations and originals.

We have done three Tamil shows, we are doing one Gujarati show and one Kannada-Dakhinish (Indo-Aryan language spoken in South India) show. If you are trying to build a big, robust subscription or advertising-supported market, you need to expand. That is how TV expanded as well... there were Hindi channels and just one Sun TV... now, everyone has expanded everywhere.

Our immediate expansion plans include expanding the scope of what we define as storytelling. Currently, we have been completely focussed on drama series, but we are also looking to build a movie business. We are planning to work on a whole range of middle to high budget movies – that’s our focus point.

We are working on a few international collaborations, which means, we are working with international players to co-create series and movies for either the Indian market or international markets. We are getting into shortform fiction as well, which is about stories and not two people dancing... that, is TikTok. I believe short-form (under 20 minutes) fiction is going to be big in India.

We have just done a show which is going to come on MX Player, an AVOD platform. We produced it as a single series and now they are inserting ads in it.

There are two types of digital content pipelines – subscription-led platforms like Netflix and Amazon, and free, ad-supported ones. When people watch subscription services for long periods of time, they’re not exposed to advertising messages during that time. It would be interesting to see the domino effect this has on advertising.

Even with all of this, I think we are too few. In this content business, everything is competition. The biggest competition for OTT platforms is something like TikTok. It’s about fighting for peoples’ time; the more time they spend on social media, the less time they have to consume a series. But competition is welcome; it raises the bar, makes you feel alive.

While we keep talking about digital being young and nascent, the fact is that a lot of the players in the business are old and established, say, broadcasters, international players, or even e-commerce, technology companies and telcos. So, while it’s a growing market, it’s also a mature one. Everyone is trying to figure out how best to monetise. I don’t think money is a problem as a lot of the players involved in this are deeppocketed. India is a large market and we could reach 500 million paying customers.

The market is large enough to accommodate everyone. It’s about economics. It is not about ‘Should there be so many platforms?’. It’s about ‘Can so many platforms afford to exist?