Toggle navigation

Modern OTT - a land grab in Zombieland

Episode Description

Did you know that the average human attention span is just 8.25 seconds? (Shorter than a goldfish). That is a 25% drop between 2000 and 2015. We are a hyper-distracted lot. At the office, we check our email inbox 11 times an hour. We pick up our phone more than 1,500 times weekly, once every 5.5 mins. The average time we watch an internet video is 2.7 minutes. But OTT consumption is spiralling; we consume 38 hours of content every month (equal to a work week). The market is booming; the platforms are losing money - all 10,000. The reason for this is consumer nirvana. Too much choice, too much control and no lock-in, to name just a few. Did you get your daily recommendation of the "not to miss shows" on an OTT platform? Did you watch it or get overwhelmed by all the recommendations and spend that hour you had kept for watching just surfing on all the platforms? Well, the sticky bum syndrome of cinema does not hold you in place for OTT In this episode, we chat with Keertan Adyanthaya, ex-Disney, ex-Fox, ex-Star, ex-MTV, and X-Man (just kidding 😎) to get to the bottom of all this. Do listen to this episode. Record or write in with your feedback.

Transcript

Hi, I am Samiran! Hi, I am Nilesh Hi, I am Sheetal and you are listening to 3TB Banter. 3 Techies Banter.

Hi everyone, I am Sheetal Choksi. Welcome to 3TB, a podcast where 3 techies banter. In today’s podcast it is going to be 4 techies who banter but welcome to 4TB. It's a podcast where we explore Tech in the Non – Tech way. It's about how the tech is the economics behind this tech and has made an impact on the future. It's fun and full of information like Samiran says we have to own the space for fund tech so we will make sure every Meta can give you an episode you will have fun with it and will have fun on something new and you will have a lot of understanding related to tech. Today’s episode is the last in a month’s theme 3 tech and we decided to close the theme on the topic that we all love OTT. All of us have favourite platforms we have our favourite shows what we thought we will do it in our portfolio is to too dive more into the tech into OTT we promise you to bring in fun in order to bring in more how should I say to get knowledge in front of TV table we have very interesting guest we have with us KEERTAN ADHYANTHAYA who is the founder of serendipity media tech. why did we think about KEERTAN for OTT TECH here prior to be the Co- Founder of Serendipity media tech he was the head of content and communication at The Walt Disney Company, the EVP of content and marketing for Fox network’s group Asia and the MD of National Geography India I am just mentioning few names of the company so that they have lot of experience in that so today’s episode is all about OTT not a Q & A session its about the fun session and it all depends you want to do something on India OTT and KEERTAN what you want to do on that.

You know when we started thinking about this whole paradox saying we said we will decide this Good as the Ass which is about that A and that water but none of us wanted either an Ass or neither wanted to be caught between water and Hay so I actually found the Infinite Monkey theorem so that in fact literally says that if you give a monkey a typewriter and he keeps typing – typing ultimately by sure he will be theory of probably of the type of Hamlet because he will exactly pull out the keys by crooks and get it and I think what people will into is what I feel is the secret sauce what makes OTT platforms being to be successful. When or while we are pure consumers of it and we like the show or we don’t like the show all of that when you go deeper into it you feel surprised and I am like through some listed data and you know looking at Balaji for some crazy amount I think its 200CRs of revenue or it was 238 CRs revenue last year but with 0 profit and even this year the net margins are like really low same it was true when I looked at the others No’s RRR and Bhool Bhulaiyaa and all these the revenues are 13% it went up apparently if you see take out all the cost margins was like 5% and very curiously I looked at NDTV I felt these guys would be bleeding to death but they are in to super profit so I felt what the hell is going on.

Traditional Media is superb they are profitable and I think this Traditional Media Company who have dealt or have jumped into OTT actually using the profits from their Traditional business to underwrite the things they are doing in OTT actually it’s a good set way for me to talk about how today or maybe for the next 3-4 years it’s all going to be about like a Land grab in Zombieland you know and this has happened at each waves when a new technology or when a new mode of viewership or listenership comes into place there are different Media Company’s New Media and Old Media Companies who jump into the fray and then they want to grab their own piece of income shelf space to be say this has happened for e: g; in the past in TV right there was a point there was age of all Era of great TV like we had 100 of TV channels we didn’t know what to do with so many channels there was TV channels for every slight the niche possible you could take….. some of those have survived or have shut down and similar today you see so many OTT streaming TV companies that they have started business and are trying to serve these super niche categories and maybe 3-4 years down line many we will see to exists if you look at international OTT Space one of the early one’s was called as Crunchy and Crispy actually was really interesting to everyone because they took super niche Japanese anime and they made it a very big business Japanese marketing anime on the streaming basis in United States at one point they have 115 million subscribers they were paying subscribers you know all around the world that is absolutely the key if we look at Hot Star for e ;g; they have actively user Bay monthly of around 300 million unique users but the pay one Hot Star had is 50 million so there are 250 5 times you know the users using the free version of Hot Star and watching Ads supported content and if you think Hot Star is only about Cricket yes it’s a very big driver IPL is a huge driver for her though the kind of No’s they have but then there is huge difference shit for long Hindi serials for a lot of Hindi movies Asia net which is like Malayalam the kind of content which they put on Star is a rehemat of the company who has presence in almost all the re-regional languages that India has right.

KEERTAN I have to ask you this is something primarily talk broadcast and published whatever is there in English language often now we have been told we are late you may appeal to someone in Urban South Mumbai South Delhi type of crowd is there but the vast portion of India is consuming actually is regional and I think that also shows up either in Instagram or probably following on YouTube if I have to do in 3 Techies Banter in Hindi I would probably have 20 times these things is it that the data also shows.

Yes the data also shows this why they show for e ;g when you watch Cricket in Cricket there are so many new commenters available so you have the Hindi and English kind of Cricket commentary but you also have multiple language just like for e ;g Tamil Kannada Malayalam and Marathi and then Bengali commentary all these were the early steps taken during the TV era when channels like National Geographic Discovery they started being themselves in multiple languages because we saw the success as that everybody has the tradition and what OTT does or what new face of media does it takes the learning’s the old media had and then applies in much better manner so for e; g: OTT platform does it they have access to a lot of data and then they will get closer insight closer kind of a view of how many people are viewing this exactly in terms of particular language do they watch certain kinds of content in the language which is closer to them and certain which are not closer to them as its in English for e ; g : in Karnataka Cricket will be watched in English but the entertainment would be watched in Kannada language right this is the kind of insight informs when they come with next piece and then the next piece of content again in the next set of content.

I think we also spoke about this previously with you had also mentioned this thing about the difference and I found its very interesting in movies the characters are different and on OTT the characters are different the face is in the movies you get big stars and you market like hell and you get the person into the theatre and once you are in they get them the right quality of Pop- Corn and coffee and what they have then the person stays there while the guarantee in OTT is probably has much more fickle bomb so that they stick there. And this happens in programming as well over a period of time I see and feel I like this thing in VOOT they are probably good in this and I like and can go to Hot Star for this but then I will watch original Apple for some reason it doesn’t seems to be a winner it seems to be like everyone has little bit of makeup like or they don’t like.

They all are controlling everything in their hand and they decide and become emperor of media right for e;g ; In movies we have these Suspension of Disbelief when you and sit inside the movie theatre all the lights gets switched off you suspend your disbelief so which is why Rohit Shetty’s movies can have a turnaround 1000 times and can land down in speed because you have Suspended your disbelief and you are ready to believe what he is saying but now with OTT you are sitting at home you have the control in your hand and you are like I am not going to Sustain my disbelief if they show the disbelief I will change the channel if I don’t like the content or if I don’t like forget the channel but I will change the program or I will change the platform there are so many choices in front of you and the other problem which OTT face is fatigue in decision making because people sit in front of their TV Set or on their device and they are scrolling and scrolling which is the habit when we are on Instagram or on Facebook we keep scrolling – scrolling till and until we find someone even here they keep scrolling – scrolling even if they find some ½ interesting its ok maybe I can scroll 5 more scenes and can find something which is more interesting right and then you realise that you have spent almost 30-40 min in front of your device and still not found anything and again you go and attend a call like that. So you don’t end up consuming the content and that’s what happened now when COVID 1st hit us that was a huge trigger point in adoption of OTT platform until then it was still satisfied with the TV services because you pay 300-500Rs a month and they had 500 TV channels you know and providing each and every damn thing which they can watch everything like sports all around the world everything that you want in front of your nose but then when COVID came around some said Hey! I want to watch in other languages I want to watch Malayan movie I want to watch Bengali Movie I want to watch Spanish movie or I want to watch South American movie or Money Heist in Spanish you know they had an access to all these languages they wanted Money Heist was dubbed in Hindi and everything was you know all the shows Narcos suddenly you have people sitting in front of TV and are talking about Narcos all those changes happened people got exposed where there was very short time towards the best content around the world so they got used to that content and now they are run out of that you know about Top quality rewarding content and you are left with a lot of thrash which is like we are tired of watching that now so they keep flipping – flipping that is why there are so many complaints over here nothing is good on Netflix any more or there is nothing any more or nothing great on these OTT platforms.

So Keertan tell me this we all know the TV serials have 13 episodes should be minimum has to be recorded and went on air then you saw the popularity of the show and next you decided that 13 would become 3000 or not but then how you will rate in OTT space is it again all 13 because I have seen limited theories I have seen 3 episodes 8 or I have seen 22 episodes on a Spot where I was reaching watching with my daughter how does it works?

So there are 2 buckets markets here actually there are 3 buckets when I am talking about the international shows and then I will talk about Indian shows as well so the International shows primarily they come from the Indian market and in America there is something call as Network TV which is like Doordarshan kind of channel and then there is Cable TV now the Network TV platform wanted all 13 episodes on up when they comment their show usually if its 13 they ask for 26 episodes so like friends would have 26 episodes every year how i met your mother would have that and if it was a 1 hr kind of drama either its day time which means 100 episodes in a year or something which is more dramatically or practical etc. they would be having 15-20 episodes and you have to understand that cable can finish 30 episodes you have to understand Netflix is only vision came in like vision literally video service which then transition improves means cleaning so initially they completed operated on Library issues putting the entire library together and then you can watch what you want to watch and once they take taste the success in that and they got a lot of access to day to day data insights and everything Hey! We mind about these 55-60 million people who are watching Netflix why don’t we commission our own episodes when they 1st started with commissioning even then their commission was between 13-15 episodes because that was a sweet spot you have got enough meat so that you can grow the characters and verify the characters and create a bond with you know whatever you are watching and then commission comes back with the 2nd episode to watch so that is how all started now the time has gone by certain stories that Netflix has like documentary it doesn’t has enough meat to tell us the story more than 4 episode or 5 episode so now how they can do commissioning in shorter time it differs in the series as they have fewer episodes so that is how trailers work.

This is very interesting one thing is people were always curious to know what is there in OTT I don’t know it falls into TV or in Cable I don’t know how it works one is this thing is this is the pilot episode doesn’t it really means people don’t like the pilot and they will pull it off that is one thing and then the other thing I find it’s a strange the customers fact is whether its Indian or American in shorter episodes but then its British they have really long episodes and they have no of episodes short ones and I was completely fascinated by the how they could run Sherlock Home’s for 3 episodes and stop it and then they come back and do 3 and would be huge and popular I mean is it the quality of their episodes or the products.

It's because the BBC is government funded so it's like they can do what they want to do. Haa Haa! Without really bothering about you know this is the perfect so as soon as you have to make a profit of I am going to commission this kind of content and if it's successful I want people to wait for the 2nd season of it and then I don’t want to spend the same money marketing in it so that they can come and watch 2 right that is the golden goal of Unicorn on 3 in the business are looking for where you create a very successful marketed well and created successful piece of content which lasts for 5-6 seasons and then you don’t have to spend as much as money to market it anymore. It will keep acquiring more and more customers. This is the Golden Unicorn. Everyone looks for it right but then in the phase of the BBC which comes Sherlock Holmes, all of that etc. they don’t have the concerns about those kinds of things they know pretty much in the space where you have to pay no matter what.

I thought they would be having sort of some secrets as well as serial production which other people could make or disappear.

I have an answer to it as you asked about the pilot episode so pilot episode really works as what we do is we first commission to make this in the episode saying this is your vision you can many money as its commission episode and then we will take a look and we will test that episode we will expose it to a No of panels and discuss and we can see if the commission is coming or no so that commission is short then we go out and check the episode if it goes very positively then we commission to the producer to make 8-10 or 12 episodes as and when we need it and then we put an ad on it usually when we put it on then we never call it as a pilot episode some people call it as pilot episode even the viewers are never wants to know the background and what was the episode all about. Ahaa.

Keertan before we go into the next segment which is more about consumer’s questions etc. I just want to end with a couple of interesting data points from you right just to get the sense from you as to how large is the I am not going to globally OTT I would stay with Indian OTT how large is the Indian OTT market?

The market is sized at 1.1 billion $which is about 9000 CRs that is the size of the market.

And what kind of viewers? What is the number of viewers?

Hot Star like I told you they are the largest player in the market and they have around 15 billion paid subscribers with the 300 million active resources monthly they used USA billion the active resources everybody else is way smaller than that and there is an entire tier for e:g; there is Amazon Prime Video which is pretty large I think they are in the range of 70-80million paid subs but a lot of its due to shopping needs which people have its pretty good services to have but then you can’t subscribe to all the they want to watch the videos that is why Amazon Prime Video subscribers are there they live on shopping because they have good content as well and Movies other than that there is Netflix who is hovering 31/2 -4 million in India then there is Voot which is coming in a big way there is Sony Liv there is Zee 5 then there is Sun in the South which has multiple languages now when you look at Amazon or Hot Star or Voot Sony Liv and Zee 5they all also have multiple regional language products on the service they dubbed the other regional languages movies into Hindi and then they dubbed the movies in other languages it’s a multi kind of offering all these people have now in addition to this they have the other player which is called as Eros now who have about 12000 movies they have 100,000 music videos they have around 100 TV shows they are pretty decent and they don’t call only the No’s in India globally they have 6 million subscribers so they pay as well off course then people call like Balaji X now who are commissioning these guys are commissioning a lots of shows as they have differ digital we see the quality and we see the kind of content they show have are very different then there are bunch of other languages Oriya and Bengali small players but they are following those niche what we spoke about earlier Tranche which was serving Japanese consumer so these are servicing their language for their audience.

You have to bet your money would be more towards English content would be more towards local regional language.

Completely local language content so they are doing the right thing by dubbing a lot of content into local languages but I think they should take it to next step where really good dubbing takes place so the thing about dubbing is you have disinterest voice doing it or somebody else is acting actually remote in that voice and remote it in that language that isn’t up to the mark at this moment you know that has to be improved once that is improved and happens it will go to places coming back to International content v/s Indian content one of the learning’s which we have over many years doing content is that International content actually content is like food you like to have an Italian meal or a Spanish meal or if you are talking about Semi India you like to go and have sort of Chinese food but at the end of the day you want of the 21 meals in a week you will have 2-3 meals which are external the rest of the 18 meals you want dal or chawal whatever in South rasam sambhar.

Really nicely put it.

So that is the same they want good content and good faces that they can identify with and the language they are familiar with. As soon as an alien you know they will watch a little bit but then on the next day they want to go back to have dal and chawal.

This is going to be the last question before I end the segment anything that has caught you by chance in these couple of years comes to OTT things which are seems to be counted specially you have been in the content and you are constantly looking at the stuff and said this should work or it doesn’t something which totally caught you off the cart in the Indian OTT.

There the rapid rate of case Adoption I think the Rate of Adoption has been really caught a lot of people by surprise because the way data prices rises dropped in India that hasn’t happened anywhere else in the world so we thought the data rates would be more gradual descent but then when JIO entered the market and suddenly the data rate dropped and as soon as data rate dropped you can always have an access on the content wherever you are or wherever you want to right that proved a big as a big driver of your driver or of your helper everyone is sitting and constantly have become a country of Zombies everyone is looking at this all the time right and they are consuming all the content all the time it's not they are using only messages services if you see people into their phones they watch something which are like video product.

I am going to end this segment. We will come back in the 2nd segment where we will ask all the questions which consumers want to know about OTT.

Hi ! Welcome back to the 2nd segment. We had a very insightful chat with Keertan and we thought in the 2nd section we will talk about the kind of queries that consumers of OTT may have. Sacred Games, Ghoul and there were a couple of others also and Netflix was somehow putting that type of content when it came up to in to Indian shows right and then on the other side was one of the top most show all types of braking bag and breaking bad was followed with better ones but all these are not the strange honour’s firstly and 2nd thing is this story line is also kind of I don’t know what to say my son was wishing for long time wanted to watch but broken down to bad once he started watching it and he is a super fan of watching Breaking Band it’s the best show ever.

I think they can be friends with my son I felt its one of the best show from these 3 shows so coming to Breaking Bad it was a cable show earlier as we used to have Cable shows we used to watch in US so Breaking Bad Cable show and coming by commission AMC TV channels with AMC TV Channel it’s the brand of AMC which needs to be changed its like PVR is the chain when we think about commissioning in the chat and then commissioning content so Breaking Bad was a commissioning show AMC was not heavily distributed to the channel and this show appeared on the channel about Chemistry professor who tries to break the crime and he starts becoming like manufacturer of Crystal myth. When it 1st started people were they didn’t know what to expect because it was very unconventional kind of show and it wasn’t very well distributed now we spoke a little earlier how Netflix when they started they were more like Video library when they turned into streaming video library they went and got a lot of these shows which had high R& D rating high rotten tomato and Breaking Bad was one of them very small cult of passionate people if you think at that point of time Breaking Bad had bought about there were 3 seasons into it that is when Netflix put it off the show and they noticed that people who started watching the show binge watch it and watch all 3 seasons back to back it was almost how in 20 before for all of us started binge watching in 24 and then Netflix binge it was really a good thing AMC on the other hand shows by Colombia Zombieland AMC at that point of time really they were wandering they want to share the show for the 4th season or not so Netflix went and threw bucket of money in them and said just do it we will put it on Netflix so they ended getting up 5 seasons of the show which was very good and then the story came into it in the end at that point of time the producers was thinking Hey! What we should do next we should do like sequel that everybody does the makers of making that thing in the other way and they said lets go Prequel and one of the most iconic characters in the show was rotten lawyer was called as All Good Men let's make a show of All Good Men and how he came into being and they made better calls off and ended earlier in this week on Tuesday we got the show and 6 seasons of All Good men they were one of the best shows which was really very good so that is really how show was commissioned on the cable channel and then on Netflix they came through, proved to be the knight in shining armour and made all the seasons for and well it went pre off the show.

Keertan there is a popular belief that today’s shows are chosen by Ad and not by the various platforms because so many people are sending proposals with so many stories and you know test episodes. How do they choose it?

Its like if you read and check the ratings what people have to say etc. they want more people to have that insight as to why this show is made and have shown now what they do is they mind a lot of data and they have access to lot of data and they mind that too for e g : for everything they have the data of the whole world like how many mins of the show or a movie we have watched and it’s a cumulative no Hey! This movie got 1.4 billion in min what do you do with that data I don’t know basically WOW to say for the stock analyst industry person I can't do anything if its 1.4 billion min of so and so it was a binge watch they internally have an access to these more data things like at what point people do dropped and that is a very insightful peace if you have a certain movie and that movie itself got a new character to come in immediately within 1 min people will start tuning out as they will not like that person or if it’s a Bollywood movie song and people are tuning so you know there is a certain segment and that is 30% of your audience who does not like the songs of the movie and then they use informing yourself with the commission of the next show so they have an access to this kind of data and they also have an access to Ok which of our audience the very 1st thing that everyone like people started prepaid even in these services like what Amazon used to do if you like this then you should do it people also bought this so that is the basic level of content recommendation but internally you can use that Hey! 40% of those people as they are watching that Narcotics show therefore there is a link between them and 40% of our audience actually liked this kind of Narcotics drug related crime related content maybe they should make more of it right so they inform as and when they come with mission content but then other than that one of the thing that Netflix does as they have gone to every market they try and commission local content and they go to the biggest maker and they go to SRK when they come to India they go to Karan Johar when they come to India they identify the top elite and they know about the talent like if SRK is making a TV show or a movie for 20 CRs they will go and give him 50CRs and make a movie now there are 2 purposes which are served in this: 1st You suddenly set the end of the market instead of being at top being the 20 and bottom at 50 so anybody else is SRK or Karan you have to fight for that kind of money and these guys have very deep pockets because they can go and market that content all over the world whereas the traditional player really the don’t have the bandwidth with the market over the world so they can get viewers from everywhere and then they focus on the content that is what Netflix does they go to Vietnam they go to Korea they go everywhere commission the top creator to create the next best thing for e g; they went to Korea bought the guy who directed the Barrier Slide to make a TV show for them now still he is making the show can be ready in some time but that is what they do now everyone in contemporary that guy says I want to sell that and all of them will go to Netflix content these are the 2 purposes over there and the other thing that Netflix does they market it in very different ways so for a particular show how the House of Cards there were 20 different trailers one trailer which will be exposed to me which will talk about the most criminal aspect as in what Cavin is doing another one which would be made for women audiences and that will talk more about of clearance or for anyone else who is a powerful women in the show so they cut the trailers according to the audience segment which they have.

As a researcher in the past episode I have done work with channel I won't name the channel but we have worked with the channel we have gone and asked we had panels we have asked them to react to the shows its like that and that is very interesting because very often you can say this character is losing relevance and suddenly felt for these 4 episodes they will kill the character to keep the show alive I am just trying to understand here there is a lot of data which is available to them at the end but sometimes you it's not like cured data as a consumer would tell you it's like a balance you all do go out and do research with consumers data how does that operate Sorry! This is the researcher asking these questions.

These kinds of services on Star or on Netflix as giant research panels are available. They have gone so far as to have 2 different story lines in the same episode. 2nd is they show in 1 A audiences who would watch the App and then they say what has been stuck to people.

I am curious to know the name.

They have disclosed it but AB testing is done. All technology practices right like Google AB and all of that so Netflix also follows the same thing of doing the dubbing testing.

When Keertan was talking about the 1st thing that came to my mind was AVC testing this is so prevalent in technology like your websites. You just do AVC testing with the apps and with the websites tough like that and then you push the content Geography specific or …. Get the feedback then they do these kinds of things so yes we are very much familiar with it.

For e: g; they have done things like they have these power users go and binging for 3 hours in a day or 4 hours in a day so in US they really get the content 4 days in advance of everybody because they know these guys then are so passionate and then they will talk to so many people about it and would bring in so many people to talk about it these services so they do all these kinds of structured kind of practice.

I do come from the retail that is what the loyalty is there 1st is consumers used to be at Shoppers Stop where you give sale preview and everything people used to rush and the Sale is going to end because of the preview that was the truth they used to run for another 6 weeks but then there is so much sense of attitude being I am the special sort of I am privileged because I am going to get exposed to the best thing so I loved the concept of Power to you Samiran you had something to say.

I was just thinking about actually we all are talking about tech and all this whole thing about Micro and sub categorisation its like people are able to do it I was just going through this list of Netflix Joiner’s apparently they have 350 joiners so I let them say let me go and try something which is funny once and they have at least more than 40-50 joiners starting with the world goofy it says Goofies Chinese Movies is Goofy Animal Tales and they detected movies Goofy coming of age Goofy it's just like Goofy all around the place Goofy this entire is there since 1980’s Goofy comedies Zombie movies haa haa and I am just like just Goofy right but one off course was the ability to capture at micro level because they know who is watching what but then what do they do with this is actually they go back and make sure kind of if you like Goofy Zombie movies will they give you more Goofy Zombie movies so if you like Zombie’s you may also like Pipe Bikers those types of shows. So how we commission different content etc., we always try to serve a different audience. So you have this thing in content that is big hit content. Now the big hit content will get you 40-45% of your audience but then the balance 55% don’t really fit into that. So then there are slivers of audience segments and you gotta bring those guys in and you gotta keep them satisfied and to do that we have content like Ghoul or goofy stuff or primarily that content categorization comes from the US again. There is an older audience there who need what we call time pass content. So you see things like “Just for laughs” for example, I don't know if you have seen that, that all fits under that goofy kind of segment and those are really popular in America, Canada, Europe etc.

So Samiran as you age and as I age we will become the goofy content right now we are not.

I was just looking at the list and the time pass content category on Netflix, we should give them a suggestion that there is a whole category called Time pass.

But somehow one thing that comes to mind when Keertan spoke about, its interesting mechanism. So you get the best guy and set a bar so high and in the end you have to still create content and for a long time at least on the Netflix side we started this segment talking about Sacred Games, Ghoul and stuff like that. You could see a particular actor also repeating so initially there was a lot of Radhika Apte coming up in serials and all. I sometimes wonder, isn't it killing creativity by making it so damn scientific based on so many AI led parameters? Sometimes you start wondering, will you ever commission a content like and I will take a very vague example because I have heard not many people can consume it, and then created by Satyajit Ray let’s say. Will it ever get picked because it is great content but what happens because I couldn't for a long time understand those serials coming especially from India. Sacred Games was still ok, Ghoul and some others had come.

But for example, there was that period drama that Netflix had done about Suitable Boy. it was done very- very in that nazuk manner of very beautiful film making, very nice shots, the attire and everything but I think they went wrong in the language, it was an English show. It was an Indian show made for Britain perhaps. So I reckon that is where they went a little….

But Nilesh your point about the Satyajit Ray movie is at the cost of being completely ostracized by fellow Bengalis, I think anybody who is watching it is probably a lead indicator of mental health issues.

Samiran you know, there is a way to contemporize anything. You know a Willam Shakespeare show can be made into Omkara. You have to, I think, adapt some of these great pieces of literature to modern times and then they will definitely work. Going back to the previous question Nilesh of how much is AI informing the creative process or how much is it influencing or hampering creativity in people, i think a lot of freedom is still given to creators by most of the platforms, they use the data mining to form the brief of the, the kind of brief they give the content creators on what audiences are looking for, what has proved to be very sticky with audiences. Then they give a lot of power to the creator to go out and create content. I think a little bit where things have gone astray at the moment is the development process. In the olden days when TV channels were developing shows, there was much more collaboration between the TV producers and the executive producers. Executive producers usually come from the channel’s side and they are experts in what audiences they have and they would do a lot of back and forth with the TV show producer and therefore make the show but now because a lot of movie guys are coming in and making TV shows, the platform is just giving them a free hand saying, aap jante ho movie kaise banana hai, aap bana lo TV show. But many of them don't know the high points of TV v/s movie and that was the thing Samiran we earlier spoke about, suspension of disbelief or what movie has to market in terms of just getting the bum into the seat, ticket price v/s how TV has to keep you engaged throughout the show, build high points for every segment where you have to come back, just the way you did your podcast where you had a segment 1 and then you gave a teaser for what's going to happen in segment 2. Maybe this is a good Segway to go into segment 3.

Ya and probably cut this into an OTT show.

Absolutely. Everything behind the scenes on OTT is what's coming up in segment 3 so stay tuned and we will be back in a couple of seconds.

Hi, welcome back to the third and final section of this chat. I would like to start this section with the tech part of it and Sheetal, Samiran, Keertan, I have a couple of friends who started with Netflix way back when it was just a start up. They were mentioning how Netflix is specifically a more of a tech company than anything else, they positioned themselves that way honestly and it gave those great valuations. I think in one of our previous episodes we talked about it, these days for valuations everyone is becoming a tech company whether you are an oil giant or an actual tech company, you are tech company is how you position but having said that I remember that Netflix has actually given some interesting pieces of technology and architecture to the software and world in general and I will just quickly talk about something which find interesting in general, I used it long time back called Chaos Monkey. Chaos Money was something Netflix came up with and Netflix essentially their bread and butter is streaming and you have multiple servers which are streaming and there should not be any disruption to your viewing experience so to test it, it is very difficult to simulate such additions when you are testing your platform architecture. What these guys did was, they created software, a piece of code called chaos monkey. Essentially this piece of code used to just disrupt streaming randomly so you don't even know what happens so something will just go off or they will just switch some stream to somewhere else. So the code was written in a way that it should disrupt. Obviously it led them to create a very resilient platform but this concept has become so important in the industry today that when I was with MasterCard and in a different way master card has to be always up. If your credit card transaction gets declined and you are in a suit. So many people in the payments industry also use this concept called chaos money whereby you just disrupt your servers and see what happens to the end user experience. So a lot of interesting tech has come into being because of these OTT platforms. Can you think of anything else? I could think of chaos money and the other thing is the fact that streaming technology has absolutely gone to the next level. We talked about bandwidth also, cheap bandwidth but the fact is, this uninterrupted streaming itself has become and how do you make it extremely efficient, it has a lot of that has come from this industry. So from the tech perspective there are a lot of things this, all these OTT platforms have provided.

Other things I am noticing are a lot of references to monkeys and we could even call our episode planet of the apes i think but go ahead with that.

A new category, goofy monkeys creating chaos.

If you continue like this and can 3 techies banter become a show, he will say put it into goofy monkeys category.

Or maybe even anime, I think, we can qualify for that now.

Ya so one of the other things is massive load factor get imposed at times of sporting events which are being streamed. That is something that is great for development of the networks around the country, around the world and to see there is absolutely no disruption. Imagine when a cricket final is being played or an NFL final is being played, the amount of video of footage that is being transmitted to the number of users that is being transmitted because it's not like the old days anymore where you send one signal out and millions of people receive that one signal. Here, when a million people want to watch one signal, a million signals have to go out. So that is the one big thing. Now if you look at the technology part of things, there is really 3 segments in which it can be broken down - one is the video hosting platform, that is where all these entertainment companies will go and put their videos so it maybe Netflix, Hot Star or whoever so they will go and create a video hosting platform. Much of the time, many of these are white label services for example MLB, majorly baseball, they were one of the earlier ones who created a fantastic service because they had these massive number of viewers coming into watch it and they needed it to happen without any disruption so they created it for themselves and they then created white label services that they then marketed out to many people. Then that white label service you should be having enough for your brand customization. Now that brand customization is not just pasting a few logos here, everything on that screen you should be able to move everywhere else. And finally video monetization because you might have a service which is just about a subscription and you watch everything but there are other services in which the first episode is free, and the next episode is paid or the rest of it is paid. So all these kinds of customization are to happen. Then finally security itself. The whole username, password, authentication, not being able to hack that service and download all that videos, all of that needs to be of paramount importance. Bright cove is a company that does a lot of this and provides white label services to the rest of the industry. The second big segment is the content delivery network and in this space AWS is the leader. Everybody uses AWS. The quality of streaming is really the benchmark on the currency on which we rate them and they provide the best quality of service. They provide servers all over the world in the smallest of towns which have all our shows which are needed. Finally the 3rd segment of technology is your video playing software or your app or whatever. Now that app is working on different smartphones. You will be shocked to hear of the number of smartphones that it needs to operate on. Even in apple it needs to be resized for every screen, the new ones have X inches screen, the old ones have a different size of screen and if you go into the android kind of ecosystem you will tear your hair out and i remember when we were launching Disney Plus in southeast Asia, it was like on android. We first went after the Samsung phones and some of the others and even after a year, in terms of number of android phones, we were only across 30 phones and still 80 phones to be done. So that just shows how much customization is needed on that. And then your app also needs to be available on laptops, computers, smart TVs, so many devices so that becomes another rat’s nest that you need to sort. The apple devices, the chrome cast devices, the Google, the whole amazon fire stick, everything. So these are the 3 big segments. Within them the segment has much more going on in terms of technology within it of the whole security, payment, all of those issues as well. So for most of our companies, technology is almost 40% of our cost base. Content will be 50-53% of our cost base and the rest of it is 7-8-10%.

Wow! That is amazing because I would have never thought that there is so much investment in technology. One would have always thought that high investments in content and creation and marketing and things like that.

Huge. technology, bandwidth is huge.

This brings us to the end of another episode of 3TB. If you liked our banter please share the episode, don't forget to follow the show. We are available on all major podcast platforms. If you are on an apple podcast please do leave a rating and review, it helps us grow. So see you next time with another theme. Bye.