SCREENXX 2020: Will OTT be the future of content consumption?

The world of content and entertainment has come into sharp focus, especially during the COVID times and the subsequent lockdown period. Digital content consumption has seen an explosion during this period and the OTT players in the last one year has reinvented and has been innovative in their approach to engage their audiences. With the recent Pandemic the OTT space has become very competitive as fresh and original content is what driving engagement.

Cinema and TV have been the staples of entertainment for Indians for years. In the last few years, digital content consumption and OTT have been finding increasing traction and have been major inroads in people’s demand for entertainment. Will OTT be the future of content consumption? Will it redefine cinema entertainment?

A special panel comprising some well known faces from the film, TV and OTT industry discussed what each of these mediums stand for today, covered by the topic, ‘TV is fictional; Cinema is larger than life; OTT is in the realism space’. The panelists included:

Gunjan Utreja, Actor, Talk Show Host and Comedian (Moderator)

Abhigyan Jha, Screenwriter, Producer and Director

Shreyansh Pandey, Head – TVF Originals, The Viral Fever

Asha Negi, Actor

Arjun Bijlani, Actor

Sahil Vaid, Actor

Anuja Sathe, Actor

Gunjan Utreja, while speaking on his special association with Abhigyan Jha, asked him about his journey in the OTT space and how it is different from TV and Cinema. Jha pointed out that ‘Jai Hind’, the first OTT show to speak about, was made 11 years ago and lasted for 6 years. According to him, “To comment at all on this topic you should be capable of doing something on the Internet or if you have already done something on the Internet. I am a huge fan of OTT, because here you can cut out the middle man and go directly to the people and that gives it a huge scope.”

Speaking about his experience as part of the ‘Jai Hind’ team, Sahil Vaid reminisced, “When I was first told that it will be shown on the Internet, I thought that I will be getting to act. I come from a theatre background and there we have different types of scripts and censorship, but when I read the script for ‘Jai Hind’ for the first time, it was Current Affairs turned into comedy, which I found really interesting. I never thought that it would gain so much of attention back in 2009 as it was been showcased on the Internet, but a couple of months later, people started recognising me and people were actually watching it, and it was then that I started taking the Internet seriously. Films in theatres are there for a short time, but movies or web series released on OTT platforms have a longer lifeline.”

Joining in the conversation, Arjun Bijlani remarked, “There is so much content out there, you are just surfing for almost an hour to find what to watch, and by that time you are sleepy and feel like watching it later. But as an actor, there is so much out there to do, you can adapt a different approach to acting. There is a very different approach to censorship, it caters to more metropolitan cities, where people are more economically strong, who can buy subscriptions and it caters to young adults. It’s a great thing for actors in terms of creativity.”

Shreyansh Pandey added here, “The journey has always been out of not getting to make what you actually want. When we started back in 2012, the kind of content that we as a bunch wanted to create, nobody was actually interested in it. In YouTube, we actually found the kind of cable operators we were looking for. Nobody was tuning into YouTube as such at that time. More than being a player, we thought of giving life to 7 or 8 pager scripts that we had in mind. ‘Rowdies’ was the first sketch which broke out.”

Asha Negi noted, “Television has trained us to be patient. But what I realise about OTT is that we have a liberty and it is more real.”

For Anuja Sathe, television has speed, but in OTT one can focus on one’s character.

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