Spoilt For Choice: How Amazon Prime Is Powering India's Storytellers An indelible part of the OTT burst in the country, Amazon Prime Video is streamed in 99 per cent of pin codes across the country.
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Mirzapur. Pataal Lok. The Family Man. Made In Heaven. These are just a few of the web series that helped make Amazon Prime Video a household name in India. An indelible part of the OTT burst in the country, it is streamed in 99 per cent of pin codes across the country. With programming across 10 languages, just last year they launched more than 500 titles on their platform.
Sushant Sreeram, country director, Prime Video, India, spoke at the recently concluded FICCI Frames convention on 'OTT: Powering India's Storytelling and Creative Ecosystem', showing us how over the last few decades Indian entertainment has changed in a big way. "I remember growing up in my home, with a single TV household where the entire family used to come together and watch shows and movies. We made the customary trip to the theatre nearby to watch the latest movie. All of us have grown up on outstanding but admittedly a select set of shows and movies, which helped us all have a shared experience. Even as recently as ten years ago, we were still all cued into a slightly more tightly defined set of entertainment. Look at it now. We have the world's entertainment at our fingertips anytime, anywhere, access to, the stories from around the country and around the globe. We have storytellers really bringing forth ideas, concepts that we really haven't had the opportunity to bask in for a long time," Sreeram started off by saying.
He spoke about how in India there is really no one entertainment preference. We are incredibly and delightfully diverse in what entertainment means for each one of us. We are diverse in what genres, what languages of entertainment, how we want to consume it on a shared device or on our mobile screens. There is really a massive heterogeneity when you think of entertaining all of India. But the thing that unifies us all is our love for entertainment. Being a land of stories and storytellers, India has great mythological stories and the more recent Bollywood blockbuster stories.
"Stories are a form of transferring values, ideas, thoughts and really stories from the underpinning of how cultures sort of evolve over time. So storytelling is inherent in our genes, in manner of speaking. And what I feel has started to take off and I think it's going to really accelerate as we look forward, is the opportunity for storytellers across the country to find an audience. What that essentially means is for anybody who is a participant the stakeholder creator in the storytelling economy, there is an audience out there waiting for your story, not just within the country, but internationally too," he elaborated.
What Sreeram's talk reminded us was about the fact that in the past, the reach of entertainment in India was limited. In the current scenario, however, a storyteller has the opportunity of several more channels of distribution. With more OTT platforms mushrooming at a rapid pace, that reach is bound to grow, along with the level of competition, but ultimately it's the viewer who is the winner, having at their fingertips an ever increasing choice.
The author can be reached at bkabir@entrepreneurindia.com and Instagram.com/kabirsinghbhandari
