Streaming may overtake TV in India soon: Sameer Nair, CEO, Applause Entertainment

MUMBAI: The Kumar Mangalam Birla-backed Applause Entertainment is eyeing a 10X growth in the next five-seven years, with the content studio taking on more ambitious projects of higher scale, said chief executive Sameer Nair.

In the last five years, the company has produced 40 shows, including 16 Indian adaptations, eight book-to-screen re-imaginations and 16 originals, including ‘Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story’, ‘Undekhi’, ‘Rudra: The Edge of Darkness’, ‘Criminal Justice’ and ‘Mithya’.

"We've been growing year on year, but the ambition is to get to a 10X number of where we are today in the next five to seven years," Nair told ET. "That will require more investments and also doing projects of a higher scale."

Nair said that the studio has now perfected its ‘hub and spoke’ model to a certain extent and has the full backing of the billionaire.

"We've got a lot more ambition and Mr. Birla has been a terrific patron. He has given us a lot of freedom, a lot of independence, and a lot of support to do this. Now, he wants to double down and build on the business," Nair said.

The studio has recently announced its most ambitious project, "Gandhi," a multi-season period drama based on the biography of historian Ramchandra Guha. Applause has also roped in Hansal Mehta to direct the series.

Last year, the company signed an exclusive agreement with ACK Media (Amar Chitra Katha), India’s leading publisher of children’s content, to enter into the animation space. It also opened an office in South India to expand into regional content.

"We are being more ambitious in what we are trying to do. ‘Gandhi’ is typically a move in that direction, so is acquiring rights of ACK catalogue and wanting to animate all 400 comics. Yes, there are slightly longer gestation periods, but a much longer tail and a much longer revenue cycle," Nair said. "We are also seriously expanding in the South states and also doing a lot of movie co-productions for larger scale movies."

During the lockdown, Applause produced eight movies, which will start to be released now directly on digital platforms.

"The first set of movies we made was more of a high concept, with a direct to platform kind of thought. Now, with the pandemic sort of over and audiences returning to theatres, our ambition is more theatrical," he said.

On the negative global outlook for Netflix and the drop in the top streamer’s global numbers, Nair said that streaming is only going to grow and may overtake TV in India soon.

"The IPL auctions that happened, in many ways validate that," he said, hinting at digital rights being sold for a higher amount to Viacom18, than the TV rights to Disney Star. "The very fact that a company goes and bids digital over TV is a very strong statement. In five years, we will know whether that was right or wrong, but to start with, it's a very strong statement and a statement of belief that the market is pivoting towards streaming, which it has been for so many years, and that it may well overtake TV."

According to Nair, who changed the way TV functioned in the late 90's by introducing daily soaps in primetime, the distribution revenues of the pay TV market are the low hanging fruit for OTT players.

"TV reaches 200 million homes... that market size is a few thousand crores in distribution revenues, which is a low hanging fruit and should be cannibalised first. Ideally, the entire 200 million homes should drop their TV subscription and take a streaming subscription. That's an obvious thing and it's happening everywhere else in the world, there's no reason why India will be spectacularly different," he said.

However, he added that the good thing in India is that a lot of the streamers are also broadcasters. "So, they are very effectively managing their own cannibalisation by doing it themselves, and this is the correct thing to do," said Nair.

On his content strategy, Nair said the variety of output from Applause has been "quite amazing".

"We have done action, thrillers, comedy, political drama, dysfunctional family, scary, supernatural, all sorts of things. We look at it as truly approaching the flat earth. It is language agnostic, geography agnostic, and genre agnostic and is not bound by TV’s limitations of linear programming. "

He said that if South Korea can go on and become a global soft power in content, India has been missing a trick for a long time.

"There's an opportunity now to make content which can be put on to global streamers and which will resonate in different parts of the world, apart from just the domestic market. I think that will automatically happen," Nair said. "The very fact that we watch ‘Narcos’ and ‘Money Heist’ seems to suggest that the reverse should happen, and not for any great plan or strategy. It's just an evolution. Audiences everywhere are watching everything. That also expands the market size and the scope for us. "