Firefly producer Niveditha Shivarajkumar: If an OTT platform wants to do Kannada series, I have a bunch of scripts ready, but they don’t want to….

As Niveditha Shivarajkumar counts down to the moment of reckoning, when she makes her debut as film producer and has Firefly in theatres on April 24, 2025, it’s a point she got to because she was making little headway as far as the Kannada web series space goes. Having collaborated with RJ Pradeepa’s Sakath Studios to make three shows – Honeymoon, By Mistake and Hate U Romeo – Niveditha, who handled the business aspect of it, says that despite her family background, it took her a good 2-3 years to crack streaming deals for the projects.

“We were ahead of time in terms of our thoughts and wanting to do Kannada web shows, but we did not have a business plan, and were, perhaps, overconfident thinking that it would all fall in place and that platforms would buy the content. That absolutely did not happen,” Niveditha reminisces. Sakath had taken care of most of the production side of things, but when it came to the business side of things and approaching OTTs, she took charge.

“It took me 2-3 years to sell, because no one was buying Kannada content. I tried from all sides, with influence and without. We dubbed one in Telugu, Honeymoon, and sold it to aha. Much later, we managed to sell Honeymooon and By Mistake to Voot (now JioHotstar) and Hate U Romeo to Talkies. The whole process left me confused; I did not know what to do and was wondering whether to start another business, because the series were not working out and movies were not on my radar,” she says.

Niveditha Shivarajkumar: OTT platforms don't want to work with newcomers

Niveditha decided to keep at it, with the web series space and has been getting lot of pitches. “Now, if a platform wants to do a 3-series deal with me, I have multiple series ready to give them, because I have put together a bunch of good scripts. In fact, not long ago, Prime Video had approached me, for a series. I pitched 6 stories, out of which 2 were Firefly director Vamshi’s stories and they picked one of his. We gave them a proper narration, had a meeting with the Prime team. They said they would get back, and withing a month, they dropped it because they wanted a known face to do it; they did not want newcomers. They even gave me a name to collaborate with,” she says.

But for Niveditha, this didn’t sit well. She had launched the banner with the intention of working with newcomers. She has also realized that for the kind of stories she resonates with, most platforms may not be ready for that. The bigger problem, though is that the top stars of Kannada cinema see web series as a major downgrade. They have not accepted that they can also dot it and that it’s a much bigger reach and audience, so working with a known name may be easier said than done,” she reckons.