NEW DELHI: Tamil film Yennanga Sir Unga Sattam will skip the wait to get to the theatres and has started streaming on SonyLIV. The social satire stars RS Karthick, Rohini Molletti, Bhagavathy Perumal and Junior Balaiya in lead roles.
Like other foreign and local streaming services, SonyLIV has been building on its regional content library and recently premiered Tamil festival favourite Thaen. To be sure, media experts agree video streaming services will have to continue to focus on original content across vernacular languages if they wish to penetrate deeper into the Indian heartland.
According to a December 2020 media and entertainment report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) along with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), 35-40% of the consumption of OTT services happens in local languages. It said that streaming services have tripled original content in Indian languages between 2018 and 2020 which stood at 1,400-1,800 hours per annum in 2020.
While foreign services like Netflix and Amazon are dabbling in Tamil, Telugu and other regional language originals, homegrown OTT service ZEE5 released almost two originals per month across Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and Kannada in the past few months. Disney+ Hotstar too is venturing into regional content with the premiere of films meant for theatres.
Plus, there has been consolidation and advent of language-focused services such as Hoichoi (Bengali), aha Video (Telugu) or Letsflix (Marathi). The focus on regional languages makes sense given that the share of rural India had grown 23% to make up 52% of all Internet users in the country by March 2020, according to the report.
OTT platforms like Netflix and Amazon have been betting big on anthologies across languages for a few months now, with shows such as Paava Kadhaigal, Pitta Kathalu, Navarasa, Ajeeb Daastaans, Ray, Unpaused, and Putham Pudhu Kaalai.
