South films likely to get larger share of OTT fees

Video streaming platforms are likely to offer 50-60% of the budgets to southern language content, with these programmes seeing much traction, accounting for 30% of OTT viewership, said industry experts.

Films like RRR, Beast, and Jana Gana Mana were big hits on Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video saw high interest for its Tamil original Suzhal.

Producers and executives also said the other advantage is southern originals are easy to put together as talent costs are not as high as Hindi content. It is estimated that 50% of overall subscription growth in 2022 came from the five markets down south.

“The audience’s pivot to streaming platforms during covid has increased the appetite to consume content across channels. This has led to an increase in the adoption of viewing content across languages, whether with subtitles or dubbed versions. Further, the wide availability of dubbed versions enabled big-ticket south Indian productions to have resonance not only with Indian audiences but also with international viewers,” Manish Kalra, chief business officer, ZEE5, India said.

The platform has witnessed a 92% increase in watch time with Telugu content topping the charts, Kalra added. RRR (on ZEE5, Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar), Karthikeya 2, Valimai and Bimbisara were watched the most and thrillers such as Vilangu and Recce have been well received along with comedies like Aha Naa Pellanta as well as Hello World. RRR, in fact, was the most popular film from India on Netflix globally.

Within its first four weeks on the service, the film was viewed for over 73 million hours across the world with more than two-thirds of viewing coming from outside India. Vijay-starrer Beast featured in the weekly Top 10 in 13 countries on Netflix while Telugu film Shyam Singha Roy trended on the India Top 10 row for films for 9 weeks and in the Global Top 10 row for films for two weeks in 11 countries such as Bahrain, Bangladesh, Oman, Qatar, among others. Balkrishna Hari Singh, founder and CEO, Frenzi - a single window search and recommendation app for streaming content said apart from large, tentpole films, smaller southern titles have also broken out, with Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, Love Today and Rorschach standing out as examples.

With north India, particularly the metros now starting to plateau as far as subscriber addition goes, streaming platforms are increasingly witnessing large portions of subscriber additions coming from the south, said Karan Taurani, senior vice-president at Elara Capital Ltd. “Growth in the India market will be subscriber-led, not ARPU-driven and if platforms want to achieve annual growth numbers of at least 20-25%, they will have to start chasing the south,” Taurani said. Opportunities lie in the fact that these markets have traditionally spent a lot of time on watching television, they like entertainment content and local competition is far from threatening. “None of the local southern OTTs have really taken off or are into originals in a big way. So there is a big gap that players like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hotstar can fill,” Taurani added.

Acquisitions of digital rights of south movies featuring A-listers have ballooned substantially in the last one year, said Shahir Muneer, founder and director at Divo, a Chennai-based music and media company. “We are seeing Rs. 100 crore plus being spent on the digital rights of top southern movies which wasn’t imaginable two years ago. Titles usually don’t get sold early but due to competition and demand, producers of big scale movies are able to lock deals,” Muneer said. To be sure, over the past few days, Netflix has announced the acquisition of post-theatrical rights of several large-scale southern movies backed by top studios like Lyca Productions, some that are untitled and yet to even go on floors. “These dubbed versions of these films have always done well on AVoD platforms like YouTube and Facebook so there will be surge on OTT as well,” Muneer said.