Inside South Asia’s Booming Low-Cost, Language-Specific Streaming Scene

variety.com:

Naman Ramachandran Go language-specific, go cheap and go hyper-local to reap success appears to be the motto of a range of streamers operating across South Asia.With countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Afghanistan, South Asia is a vast region populated by 1.9 billion people speaking a welter of languages.

It is no secret that people in the region prefer consuming content in their own tongues. The narrative around streamers in South Asia is understandably around the existing market leading global streamers such as Disney Plus Hotstar, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, with an air of expectancy around the impending launches of HBO Max and Apple TV Plus.The majority of the local programming among the bigger streamers and their competitors including SonyLIV, Lionsgate Play, ALTBalaji, ZEE5, Voot and ErosNow is in Hindi, an Indian language that is consumed around the region thanks to the soft power of Bollywood.

It is only in recent years that the larger players have begun expanding into the large South Indian market. Meanwhile, the established local language players, which have a first mover advantage but not necessarily bottomless pockets, are forging ahead with plans to retain and expand their loyal audience bases.

One of the market pioneers is India’s Shemaroo, which began in 1962 as a book lending library, evolved into a video library in 1976, a home video rights company in 1987 leading into broadcast syndication in 1993, film production in 2004, digital distribution in 2009 to launching streamer ShemarooMe in 2019.During this journey, Shemaroo went through one of the largest IPR consolidation exercises in India, buying the rights in perpetuity for 1,600 films across languages..