'New Screen Ecology' in India: a Study in Digital Transformation of Media

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The ‘New Screen Ecology’ in India:

A Study in Digital Transformation of Media

Smith Mehta

PGD, MMC

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of Communication

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technology

2021 ii

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Statement of original authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature:

QUT Verified Signature

Smith Mehta

05 February 2021 v

Keywords

Internet, on-demand, India, platform economy, new screen ecology, production culture, creators, platforms, portals, intermediaries, talent agents, multi-channel networks, Bengali,

Marathi, Hindi, regional content, localization, streaming media services.

Abstract

Media industries worldwide are grappling with the effects caused by digital disruption at every level of production, distribution and consumption. This thesis maps the implications of digital transformation in a major national context by investigating contemporary online content creation and distribution practices in India. The core theoretical framework employed is critical media industries studies. This approach combines cultural studies’ focus on power and representation with media studies’ commitment to detailed attention to the dynamics of industrial culture.

I provide an in-depth study on the emergence of the Indian online audio-visual landscape by showing how the launch of a local and global suite of User Generated Content (UGC) platforms like Youtube, Facebook, and professional Generated Content (PGC) portals like Hotstar, TVFPlay, Netflix shape the working conditions of above-the-line labor. Drawing on first-hand research with three categories of human agents: creators, platform and portal executives, and intermediaries (talent agents, multi-channel networks), it develops the concept of the ‘new screen ecology’ to show how the Indian screen industries are affected by social relations between these human agents and whose industrial practices blur the amateur- professional divide through creator and content interdependencies. Using extensive semi- structured interviews, textual evidence and industry analysis of trade press literature, it addresses issues (including creative autonomy, censorship and differing production cultures) related to the reflexive practices of these human agents as they build an emerging screen ecology that is distinct from the existing practices of the film and television industries.

At the same time, the multimedia strategies adopted by the creators to combat dependency on any one streaming service reflect strategic responses to precarious working conditions for online creator labor. Findings also suggest a systemic reinforcement of prevalent gender biases. The thesis addresses gaps in the media industry studies literature on the dynamics of digital transformation in the screen industries in a region-specific context and contributes to a body of literature on Indian digital production cultures.

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Contents

Statement of original authorship ...... iv Keywords ...... v Abstract ...... vi List of figures and tables ...... x Figures ...... x Tables ...... x Acknowledgements ...... xi Previously published material ...... xiv Chapter 1 Studying the Indian new screen ecology ...... 1 Research Questions ...... 6 Key frameworks ...... 7 Platforms and Portals in the Indian NSE ...... 7 Formality and Informality in the Indian NSE ...... 10 Critical Media Industries Studies and Neigbouring Approaches ...... 12 Defining India’s New Screen Ecology ...... 22 Thesis Method ...... 26 Thesis Structure ...... 28 Chapter Outlines ...... 30 Chapter 2 Overview of the Indian Audio-visual Media Ecology ...... 34 Present Film, Television and Online Media Landscape ...... 34 India’s Tryst with Film and Broadcast Media (1991-2019) ...... 38 Bollywood (1991-2019) ...... 38 Indian Television Industry (1991-2019) ...... 41 Digital Infrastructure for NSE ...... 45 Digital Divide ...... 48 Indian NSE within the Global and Local Digital Context ...... 50 Chapter 3 Mapping the Key Platforms and Portals ...... 61 Telecom-led Portal ...... 64 Reliance Jio ...... 64 Social Media Platforms ...... 66 YouTube ...... 66 Facebook ...... 68 Broadcaster-owned Portals ...... 70 Hotstar ...... 70 Voot ...... 72 Zee5 ...... 74 ‘Pure play’ Local Portals ...... 76 TVFPlay ...... 76 viii

ALTBalaji ...... 78 Local Strategies of Global Portals ...... 80 Netflix and Amazon Prime Video ...... 80 Spuul ...... 85 Language-specific portals ...... 86 Hoichoi ...... 86 Addatimes ...... 88 Conclusion ...... 89 Chapter 4 New Screen Ecology narratives about Television ...... 91 Television’s Industrial and Cultural Logics ...... 93 Industry Lore ...... 97 Economic Base for Industrial and Cultural Logics ...... 102 Gendered Perception of Television ...... 104 Moving towards NSE ...... 107 Conclusion ...... 112 Chapter 5 Indian Online Creator Culture ...... 114 Positioning Online Creators ...... 115 Precarious Creativity ...... 116 Precarity in the Indian Media Landscape ...... 118 New Business Practices ...... 120 Strategic Approaches to Labor ...... 120 Professional Identity ...... 124 Non-hierarchical Corporate Structures ...... 126 Building a Media Career from Social Media ...... 129 Entrepreneurial Labor ...... 133 Challenging the Domination of the Television and Film Industries ...... 136 Future Challenges ...... 137 Censorship ...... 137 Gender Inequality ...... 140 The #MeToo movement and India’s NSE ...... 141 Chapter 6 Regional and Localizing Online Content Practices ...... 147 Regional Content as a Distinctive Feature of the Indian NSE ...... 150 The Indian Regional Landscape ...... 152 The Blurring of Regionalization and Localization Boundaries ...... 154 Platform/Portal Localization Strategies ...... 156 Creator Localization Strategies ...... 159 Exploiting the Cultural Politics of Language...... 163 The Potential of Regional Online Creators ...... 165 Conclusion ...... 166 ix

Chapter 7 The Role of Intermediaries ...... 168 Charting MCN and Talent Agent Distinctions ...... 169 Backgrounding Intermediaries ...... 171 Indian Talent Agents ...... 173 Diversification and Localization Practices of Talent Agents ...... 176 Localizing the Indian Operations of Netflix ...... 177 Managing Multiple Talents ...... 180 MCNs as Intermediaries ...... 181 MCNs as ‘Creator Network’ ...... 182 Diversification and Localization Practices of MCNs ...... 185 Rise of ‘New Intermediaries’ ...... 187 Conclusion ...... 188 Chapter 8 Conclusion ...... 190 Overview ...... 190 ‘Helicopter’ View ...... 191 ‘Top of the Building’ View ...... 193 ‘On-the-ground’ View ...... 194 The Indian NSE into the Future ...... 197 Platforms/Portals ...... 198 Shifting Power Dynamics of Intermediaries? ...... 203 Creators ...... 204 Closing Note ...... 207 References ...... 208 Appendix ...... 263 Interviewees for the Study ...... 263

List of figures and tables

Figures

2.1 Industry-wise growth year-on-year...... 36

2.2 Socio-economic data on Indian online viewing...... 47

3.1 Ghose’s Facebook Creator page summary...... 68

3.2 Ghose’s Facebook Creator page insight on videos ...... 69

3.3 Zee5 subscription plan...... 75

4.1 Photograph of TVF logo outside its office ...... 108

5.1 Arré Facebook post promoting Voot content ...... 126

6.1 Scheduled Indian languages in descending order based on speaker’s strength ...... 151

6.2 Regional language television consumption (% increase 2017–18) ...... 152

6.3 Creator Ghose’s audience overview, 2018 ...... 156

8.1 Five of the top 10 apps in India, 2018 ...... 183

8.2 TikTok India statistics ...... 183

Tables

2.2 List of platforms/portals operating in Indian new screen ecology ...... 52

Acknowledgements

As someone who transitioned from the screen industry to academia, it was not easy to imagine the task of carrying out a scholarly work of this scale in a different country. For this reason, I am supremely thankful to Professor Stuart Cunningham, my primary supervisor and Prof David Craig (Stuart’s co-author on Social Media Entertainment). I am particularly grateful to Stuart for he saw in me what I did not and for taking me under his wing to build on his and David’s stellar work on social media entertainment. My gratitude also goes to Associate Professor Kevin Sanson, my associate supervisor, for not only agreeing to supervise me following my confirmation seminar but also helping me to navigate the various obstacles that any PhD student faces as they steer through the rabbit hole of literature, publications and seminars. Thank you, Stuart and Kevin, for your unwavering support at all times. My thanks to Dr Patrik Wikstrom for co-supervising me with Stuart during the first year of my PhD studies.

Achieving this milestone was made easier due to the efforts of several academics and fellow students: Professors Amanda Lotz, Patrik Wikstrom, Jean Burgess, Michael Curtin, Dr Peta Mitchell, Associate Professor Michael Dezuanni, Dr Subin Paul, Jarrod Walczer, Dr Guy Healy, Sriram Mohan, Bondy Kaye, Dr Edward Hurcombe, Xu Chen, Delfi Chinnappan, Ashwin Nag, Gabriela Lunardi, Aleesha Rodriguez, Xiaoting Yu, Claire Darling, Dr David Myles, Dr Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, Dr Kelly Lewis, John Cauchi. All offered guidance and support in varying capacities. I take this opportunity not only to thank them (my supervisors included), but also to apologize for coming across as obstreperous with my nagging questions. Special thanks also to my final seminar panellists, Professor Terry Flew and Dr Tess Van Hemert. My gratitude to Susan Jarvis for proofreading my thesis in the shortest possible time. A special thanks to my two anonymous examiners.

I am also thankful to the lovely QUT staff, in particular librarians Alice Steiner and Ellen Thompson, the Digital Media Research Centre staff and the Creative Industries faculty staff, for facilitating a harmonious environment in which I could conduct my research as well as offering me assistance at several junctures of my PhD journey. I am also thankful to QUT for offering the QUT Post Graduate Research Award (QUTPRA) scholarship which supported my living costs and covered my tuiton fees. No amount of words can explain the level of care that QUT takes in helping an international PhD student to settle into Brisbane to carry their work peacefully. I would have loved to name everyone individually, but given the paucity of space, I xii would like to do so in a more personal one-on-one setting. Special thanks to my all-weather mentors Prof. Ruchi Jaggi, Director, Symbioisis Institute of Media and Communications and Prof. Siddharth Deshmukh who continue to offer generous support every time I land at their doorstep.

This study would not have been possible without the support of my industry colleagues and mentors, who offered to share their time and contacts during my fieldwork. Special thanks to all my ex-bosses from the media industry Jyoti Kapur Das, Ajit Andhare, CEO, Viacom18 Studios, Sarita Patil, independent producer, Gaurav Gandhi, Director and Country General Manager, Amazon Prime, Monika Shergill, Vice President, Neflix, Aritra Mukherjee, founder, JumpCut Goa, Mautik Tolia and Sukesh Motwani, Bodhi Tree Production co-founders, for imparting knowledge and skills in me. I am deeply thankful for the opportunities they gave me.

Many of them also appear in the Appendix as formal interviewees. Special gratitude to my Jyoti Kapur Das (independent filmmaker), Gaurav Gandhi (Director and Country General Manager, Amazon Prime) and my cousin Jay Mehta (Managing Director, Warner Music India), for sharing gyaan as well as contacts. Many thanks to my translators Shivani Gera and Shilpa Talari for assiduously transcribing the interviews in a short time. Special thanks to my mentor, Prof. Ruchi Jaggi, and my first recruiter, Anand Talari, Co-founder, Mavcomm Group, for helping me in hiring these extraordinary hardworking translators.

Places, like people, leave an indelible mark in creating a friendly space for international students, and it is no different in my case. I would like to acknowledge my landlord and wonderful host, Mr Peter Dick, for letting me stay at a cost that every student can only dream of paying. Similarly, my working space at DMRC Z1-515 will remain one of my most cherished working spots for a long time. Gratitude to beautiful Brisbane and Australia for helping me to achieve this milestone.

I remain indebted to my parents, Jyotsana Mehta and Nitin Mehta, and sister, Hiral Mehta. In trying to achieve more than was asked of a Ph.D. student, I have neglected the family’s small and simple expectations. I am indebted to all the support they have given in testing times. I owe many thanks and deep gratitude to Sampurna Ghose, my special friend who demonstrated remarkable resilience in helping me to achieve my dreams – I would never have come this far without the stability she afforded me with her Zen-like attitude. Many thanks to my dear friends, Sohom Sengupta and Sumana Sengupta, who let me stay in his lovely abode while I xiii carried out my fieldwork in Kolkata. I am thankful to my friends Ravi Ray, and Pooja Kanade Ray for offering their generous support throughout my PhD journey. I am indebted to Magdalena Wischnewski, my partner, for supporting me through my final leg of the PhD journey.

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Previously published material

Material arising from this research project has previously been published in the following sole and co-authored papers.

 Mehta, S. (2020). Television’s role in Indian new screen ecology. Media, Culture & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443719899804  Mehta, S. (2020). Indian intermediaries in new media: Mainstreaming the margins. Convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519896167  Mehta, S. (2020). Localization, diversification and heterogeneity: Understanding the linguistic and cultural logics of Indian new media. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(1), 102–120. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877919880304  Mehta, S. (2019). Precarity and new media: Through the lens of Indian creators. International Journal of Communication, 13, 5548–5567.  Mehta, S. (2019). The perils of being a ‘woman’: Acute problems within Indian media ecology. Feminist Media Studies, 19(7), 1056–1060. (Critical commentary).  Mehta, S., & Kaye, D. B. V. (2019). Pushing the next level: Investigating digital content creation in India. Television & New Media. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419861698

Chapter 1 Studying the Indian new screen ecology

India’s media landscape boasts a flourishing multilingual mass media industry with over 100,000 newspapers and publications, more than 800 television channels and a thriving film industry. In fact, unlike the shutting or downsizing of staff in the newspaper business across the West due to lack of advertising revenue, India has most recently experienced a 5 percent growth in the print business (KPMG, 2019). Further, radio is still one of India’s popular mass media, with an estimated growth of 6 percent (KPMG, 2019). Overall, the media and entertainment sector is valued at US$ 23.9 billion and is predicted to reach US $33.6 billion by 2021 (EY, 2019). While television continues to be the preferred medium of audio-visual consumption with 197 million television viewing houses (EY, 2019), the introduction of over 40 streaming media services (KPMG, 2019) has created new avenues for online creation, circulation and consumption of content in India.

According to a consultancy report, the Indian online audio-visual media landscape has managed growth of 26% in digital revenues from US$2.3 billion to US$2.9 billion in the 2019 financial year (KPMG, 2020). The recent availability of affordable internet-enabled multimedia devices, a reduction in data charges, and growing digital video consumption rates have created new opportunities in India’s digital economy (Kay, 2018; Mukherjee, 2019). Moreover, the participatory framework of platforms like YouTube and Facebook has influenced the landscape of content production in India (Kumar, 2016). The production of digital video content has shifted in recent years with the emergence of streaming media services that have intensified competition in the television and film industries (Bhushan, 2017; Vikas, 2018). This shift has prompted Indian ‘legacy’ broadcasters – those that existed before the widespread adoption of digital technologies, such as Viacom18, Star and Zee – to rethink their distribution and creation practices in India. This shift has culminated in these companies introducing their own streaming media services.

Competing alongside social media platforms and broadcaster-led streaming media services is an eclectic mix of digital native streaming services (ALTBalaji, TVF), global streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spuul), language-specific streaming services (Hoichoi, Addatimes) and telecom provider-led streaming services (Jio). As I discuss in chapter 5, these new practices, in turn, have led to the emergence of production companies, such as TVF, AIB, 2

Arré and Pocket Aces, in which content produced by both industry professionals and emerging professionalizing amateurs, coexists. Central to this transformation is the contribution of Indian talent agents and online multi-channel networks (MCNs), which I define as intermediaries and are playing a significant role in facilitating the localization strategies of global streaming media services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, enabling the movement of creators from platforms to portals and expanding their value propositions through investments in content and talent-led ventures.

I map digital transformations in Indian screen industries by highlighting the interdependencies between these streaming services through an exchange of creator and content strategies, as well as its distinctiveness from the traditional media, principally television, through a focus on the production culture between creators, platforms, portals, talent agents and online multi-channel networks (MCNs). I limit the scope of the study of the online audio-visual entertainment landscape to platforms and portals that commission or facilitate the creation of original content. I use the term ‘new screen ecology’ to signify the interdependencies of platforms, portals, talent agents, online multi-channel networks (MCNs) and creators. I argue that there are significant differences between the screen ecology that has grown around streaming services in India and the established screen ecology based around broadcasting and film. I elaborate on this in the section ‘Defining New Screen Ecology’ below.

The new screen ecology consists of players from six sectors: traditional broadcasters-led portals (Hotstar, Voot, SonyLIV); social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook); digital ‘pure- play’ native portals (ALTBalaji, TVFPlay); global portals (Netflix, Amazon, Spuul); regional language-specific native portals (Hoichoi, Addatimes); and a telecom-owned portal (JioOnDemand). I have restricted the scope of my study to two social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook) and 11 portals (Zee5, Hoichoi, Addatimes, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Voot, Hotstar, Reliance Jio, ALTBalaji, TVFPlay, Spuul) owing to their presence in hosting or commissioning original content. These are operating fully-fledged businesses in the online content development and production space, either through the facilitation of talent on social media or through commissioning original online audio-visual content.

A full account of the role of telecom businesses in providing the necessary digital and economic infrastructure to the Indian NSE and in facilitating significant changes within the wider digital ecology is beyond the scope of this thesis. This is due to my principal focus on the production culture dynamics that shape online creator labor. Nevertheless, within these 3 categories also lie telecom operators such as Airtel and Vodafone, which offer aggregated content on their dedicated applications such as Airtel TV (‘India’s leading provider of Prepaid, 2018’), Vodafone Play (SH, 2017), dedicated television distributor-run portals (Den Networks, Videocon, D2H, Tata Sky, Dish TV) and portals which host syndicated or licensed content (Bigflix). Given their centrality to the Indian NSE, I detail their contribution in the next two paragraphs.

Noting the demand for increased online video consumption, telecommunication providers such as Reliance Jio, Vodafone, and Airtel partnered with broadcasters and film studios to offer syndicated content through their respective applications (Fitzgerald, 2020). As I will show in chapter 2 and 3, the entry of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) in the telecommunications sector in 2015 through Reliance Jio played a significant role in the roll-out of high speed and low-cost internet to the masses. Reliance Jio’s low-cost internet plans forced competitors like Vodafone and Airtel to follow suit (Mukherjee, 2019). As Athique and Parthasarathi (2020) note in their study of the political economy of the Indian platform economy, the entry of Reliance Jio into the content and services sector through the introduction of Jio TV, Jio Music, Jio Chat offered the necessary means for Reliance Jio to expand its data services—a strategy that was soon adopted by telecom providers like Vodafone and Airtel to stay in the competition (Ithurbide, 2020).

While exploring the capitalist logics that pervade the portals within the Indian media industries, Bouquillon (2020, 136) highlights the use of ‘coopetition’ (collaboration and competition) strategy between telecommunication providers and portals for ‘exchange rights of access to content (to more or less original content), easier access to networks and access to subscribers.’ Citing three such instances of partnership—first between Jio and Eros Now, Hotstar, ALTBalaji, and Zee5, second between Airtel with Eros Now, HOOQ and SonyLiv, Zee5, Amazon Prime, and Netflix and third between Vodafone with Amazon Prime, Netflix, Eros Now, ALTBalaji and HOOQ—Bouquillon (2020, 137) evidences the dynamic ways in which both telecommunication providers and portals collaborate and compete at the same time. I only map one telecom provider Reliance Jio’s content and pricing strategy (see chapter 3), as my research is concerned explicitly with original content commissioning strategies, not all content acquisition strategies.

India’s regional diversity also offers more complexities and opportunities to the Indian screen industry’s digital transformation. India’s plurality of languages offers a distinct economic 4 opportunity for media producers to target audiences defined by language, resulting in multiple and overlapping media markets. Athique et al. (2018, 13) remind us of the challenges that come with studying ‘market power in a media economy characterized by multiple and overlapping ‘cultural markets’’ in their investigation on the market dynamics of the Indian media economy. The drawing of Indian state boundaries based on language by no means binds the language-specific audience to a particular territory.

Moreover, a multilingual Indian audience within and beyond India creates a significant local and transnational demand for multiple Indian media markets. The demand for Bengali language content in several Indian states such as West Bengal and Maharashtra and countries like the US and Bangladesh is an example of language’s potential to create market opportunity. While analyzing the political economy of Indian media culture, Parthasarathi et al. (2020) rightly admit that the linguistic organization of Indian states presents a critical opportunity for ‘different historical, political and economic trajectories for media markets in particular geographies.’

Using in-depth interviews with select creators, streaming media executives and representatives from intermediaries, textual evidence and trade press literature, I highlight the everyday content practices of the Indian new screen ecology and map the trajectories of creators as they move from platforms to portals and films. My cohort of creators consists of both previously professional and professionalizing amateurs. I profile my creator cohort in the section on ‘Thesis method’ below.

I focus on features of the online creator culture, such as autonomy, freedom for experimentation and newer opportunities for growth within local and global markets. I argue that the opportunities in the new screen ecology (hereafter, NSE) motivate the creators to create online content, gain audience popularity and further their aspirations across the media industry landscape. My understanding is shaped by the interviewee cohort, which I will introduce below. It is characterized by a wide range of professional screen talent as well as professionalizing amateurs (or social media entertainers), all gathering around the opportunities provided by the NSE.

Athique (2019) highlights this distinct nature of India’s platform economy, in which ‘media platforms are, like all markets within a true economy, significantly dependent upon their interaction with other markets.’ Like Athique’s (2019) exposition, I argue that even if one 5

restricts the scope of the study to media objects on one medium, the transactions on a particular medium are often influenced by the industrial practices on other mediums – an example being the evidence gathered from my cohort of existing and emerging media practitioners who have migrated to online media owing to their reservations about traditional media storytelling, as discussed in chapter 4.

I argue that Indian television’s regressive creative and programming practices also play a significant role in motivating creators to gravitate towards social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook to express their creativity. Through the content-creation practices on social media, these creators build a distinct following for themselves through followers and subscribers, which is considered as evidence of their ability to access the perceived ‘professionally generated’ spaces of films and portals. The portals also serve as another outlet for independent filmmakers and digital media companies who do not have the wherewithal to bear the enormous marketing and distribution expenses associated with theatrical releases (KPMG, 2020).

Despite fostering the commercially sustainable practices of innovative multi-platform practices of creators, the Indian NSE has also induced new forms of precarious labor and reinforced gendered structural inequalities prevalent in India’s media industry. The lack of secure income afforded to the creators due to algorithmic uncertainty of social media platforms and the unpredictable decision-making of portals has led them to look for opportunities across film and streaming media services continuously. As a result, creators are working more than usual to cope with the demands of multimedia labor. The anxieties arising from insecurity and over- work provide an analytical balance set against the opportunities for workers in the Indian NSE.

As I show in chapter 5, precarity also arises from unsafe working conditions. The #MeToo movement in India serves as an important reminder for both existing and emerging media businesses to take much greater ownership of gender discrimination policies. The sustained global attention recently given to gender bias within the media industry has forced media practitioners to acknowledge and act—even if reluctantly—towards progressive cultural politics both on and off the screen. Unlike earlier times, where cases relating to the ‘casting couch’ and sexual harassment were pushed under the carpet, the current backlash on the participation of accused/alleged online media practitioners demonstrates a more active, educated and aware audience, which is becoming increasingly wary of separating the art from the artist. While my research questions did not focus directly on gender issues within the NSE, 6

I evidence the impact of gender on the industrial and cultural dynamics of the NSE concerning the #MeToo movement in India.

Research Questions

As evidenced by the following points, and in comparison to Lotz (2017) on portals and Cunningham and Craig (2019) on social media entertainment, my study explores and analyzes the mediation between media, technology and human agents in three areas:

 ownership structures and value propositions of the diverse streaming media services operating in India  quotidian practices and motivation of content creators in relation to platforms and portals  the role of intermediaries such as talent agents and multi-channel networks in the Indian new screen ecology.

I approach this field from within a critical media industry studies framework (CMIS) (Havens, Lotz and Tinic, 2009) to understand the power dynamics between human agents involved in different content creation processes. Herbert, Lotz and Punathambekar (2020, 15) argue how different levels of inquiry can offer ‘differing vantage points’ for researching by eliciting how ‘the surface of the earth appears differently from space, from a jet at 30,000 feet, a helicopter, a tall building, or when standing on the ground.’ I adopt a similar multi-scalar perspective to articulate the following three research questions, which guide my study of the distinctive nature of the Indian NSE.

1. To what extent do both platforms and portals facilitate the growth of Indian creator careers? 2. How do creators’ new business practices, professional identities and diverse regional voices contribute to an Indian new screen ecology distinct from dominant television and film industries? 3. What roles do Indian intermediaries play in facilitating the distinctiveness of the Indian new screen ecology?

These research questions are meant to encourage inquiry into the everyday lives of media practitioners that use digital and social media to sustain the production, circulation, and 7

consumption of online media forms that eventually impact the way screen industries operate in India. Three frameworks underpin my understanding of the NSE, as discussed below.

Key frameworks

The first framework borrows from Cunningham and Craig (2019) and Lotz (2019) to distinguish the NSE into platforms and portals. The second framework uses Athique and Parthasarathi (2019, 2020) understanding of the Indian media markets to situate the Indian NSE as a link between the formal-informal media economy. The third and final framework uses the CMIS approach to explore the multi-scalar nature of the Indian NSE. I clarify these frameworks in the section below.

Platforms and Portals in the Indian NSE

While outlining the distinctions of the social media entertainment from the traditional media industries (film and television), Cunningham and Craig (2019) delineate streaming media services such as Amazon, Netflix and Voot as closed-ended digital media platforms and YouTube and Facebook as open-ended social media platforms. They define creators as social media entertainers who monetize content through various commercial strategies such as brand integrations, marketing and advertising. They argue:

YouTube was launched and quickly engaged in competing with Hollywood film and television for audiences and advertisers through a mix of professionally generated (PGC) and user-generated content (UGC) strategies. But YouTube encountered competition from emerging PGC video portals, like iTunes, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, and turned to fostering the rise of creators through partnership agreements and programmatic advertising. (Cunningham and Craig, 2019, 37)

Cunningham and Craig’s (2019) account of social media entertainment de-emphasizes the calling card model. Much of their emphasis is on what creators may lose from attempting to move into mainstream media (loss of creative control, subjection to external authorities, loss of time building and maintaining communities). They also reference examples of the failure to make this transition. In contrast, I argue that the Indian NSE offers a different model than their US-centric one. Underlining online content practices by divorcing social media platforms from portals limits the ability to understand how Indian creators operate across multiple streaming 8 media services and, further, use it as a conduit for developing symbiotic relationships within the media industries.

I also parse the relationship between television and online media to highlight how television’s regressive industrial practices have driven creators toward the Indian NSE. Highlighting everyday content creation practices in India also contends with Cunningham and Craig’s (2019) findings that online content creators are purely social media entertainers. I highlight the interdependent set of relationships that exists in India between social media platforms, portals, films, television and creators by highlighting the two distinct creator industrial practices in the Indian NSE—the movement of creators from platforms to portals and films on the one hand and from television to platforms and portals on the other.

I also discuss the implications for online content creators of platform and portals’ production culture and the broader impact within the Indian media industry in chapters 3-6. In contextualizing the creators’ mobility across the social/digital media divide and highlighting platforms and portals’ ecology, I emphasize that the online content creation practices cannot be studied by isolating platforms from portals. My objective is to map creator trajectories and highlight content creators’ distinctive practices across streaming media services, whether platforms or portals. I map the India-specific content, revenue and pricing strategies of select streaming media services and trace how they feed off each other through sharing creator labor and content commissioning in a bid to dominate the attention economy.

Amanda Lotz’s (2014) seminal work on digital transformations within the US screen industry provides a comprehensive understanding of the changes brought about by portals like Netflix, HBO, which Lotz identifies ‘internet-distribution television,’ and sites for ‘professionally produced content circulated and consumed through websites, online services, platforms, and apps, rather than through broadcast, cable or satellite systems.’ In her analysis – albeit in the US context – Lotz highlights the influence of technology on shaping our viewing experience with the advent of non-linear programming on internet television. She chronicles the history of US television to justify the transitions that impact television watching and programming structures. By drawing comparisons between television and digital consumption, she discusses the effects of ‘asynchronous viewing,’ identifying the qualities of convenience and portability offered by the new media. Further, she identifies the period post-mid-1980s as the ‘post- network’ era that has disrupted the traditional bundling practices of distribution exercised by television networks to consumers: 9

The oft-made comparison in the rise of the post-network era of television contemplates whether the television networks and channels will choose to narrowly conceive of themselves as networks in the network-era sense – as entities bound to previous norms of program acquisition, distribution, and scheduling – or whether they will recognize that they are in the content aggregation and distribution business and adjust their competitive practices and business models accordingly. (Lotz, 2014, 273)

Lotz (2017) defines ‘internet-distributed television’ as comprising portals that increasingly curate television-like content. In her most recent work, which articulates the critical milestones that shaped the transformation in audio-visual consumption in the United States, she discusses the transition from television to streaming as an opportunity that disrupted the distribution of content.

In India’s case, in contrast, YouTube has emerged as a site that, besides hosting other non- commercial and homemade videos, is an alternative destination for web series, stand-up comedy videos and diverse genres that the Indian television industry could not appreciate due to its rigid industrial and cultural logics. Whereas in the United States, a clear divide seems to exist between creator labor on social media and ‘internet-distributed television’ such as Netflix or Amazon Prime (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Lotz, 2017), there is a significant movement of creators across portals and platforms in India. The formal-informal dynamics allow for greater creator and content mobilizations between platforms and portals.

In fact, having arrived later than YouTube and Facebook, portals like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Sony LIV look to collaborate with individuals and digital media companies that have discovered success on social media through content and talent led ventures to secure sustainable income from social media entertainment. As I show in this thesis, the success of digital media companies and creators specializing in and commercializing online content- creation practices paved the way for the portals to borrow the expertise of successful social media creator labor to develop their content slate. The portals also invested in humor and drama genres, which were hugely popular on YouTube in India. As I show in chapter 4, there is more diversity in content creation across the NSE than in the television industry. For this reason, while I am cautious about adopting the term ‘internet-distribution content’ as ‘television,’ given India’s region-specific context, I use and extend Lotz’s (2017, 2018) and Cunningham and Craig’s (2019) analysis of platforms and portals to define the Indian NSE. 10

The second framework that I discuss below highlights the varied formal and informal dynamics of the Indian media economy within which the Indian NSE is situated.

Formality and Informality in the Indian NSE

I build on the previous body of literature (Sundaram, 2009, Lobato and Thomas, 2015, Athique, 2018) on the Indian media economy to argue that the Indian NSE plays a crucial role in formalizing the informal transactions that shape the Indian media economy. I argue that the widely recognized ‘informal’ nature of the Indian economy is curated by the platforms and portals operating as aggregators that offer distinct value propositions. However, before proceeding, it is essential to contextualize the size and scale of the Indian informal economy to fully comprehend the cultural and economic potential of its formalization. The informal economy contributes to nearly two-thirds of the country’s GDP and accounts for over 80 % of non-agricultural employment (Sharma & Kumar, 2019). However, as I highlight below, the Indian media economy’s transactions are ‘informalized’ in various ways.

Perhaps, the most straightforward economic understanding of the term ‘informal economy’ is underlined by the fact that the financial transactions conducted within this economy do not contribute to India’s GDP. Lobato and Thomas (2015) define the informal economy ‘as an analytical concept that refers to a range of activities and processes occurring outside the official, authorized spaces of the economy’ (Lobato & Thomas, 2015, 7). For instance, the introduction of the borderless digital economy meant open access to pirated content, leading to several revenue losses for filmmakers (Lobato & Thomas, 2015). However, the informal economy’s nature also allowed for market expansion in selling digital rights of films or music. Lobato and Thomas (2015) study the relations between the formal and informal economy within online media to argue that the informal economy exhibits the same levels of creativity and sophistication as the formal one.

Management scholar Bhattacharjee (2019) delineates the informal economy’s attributes into employment characteristics and enterprise characteristics. Bhattacharjee (2019, 2) refers to informal employment as ‘nonstandard, contingent, short‐term labor arrangements wherein the workers are not protected by labor laws and do not get the benefits of social welfare systems.’ Informal enterprises consist of ‘unregulated, unlicensed, and untaxed microenterprises’ that include ‘small enterprises ranging from waste‐recycling units, street vendors, pavement food 11

stalls, sale of pirated books, and digital products to home‐based manufacturing enterprises’ (Bhattacharjee, 2019, 2).

Sundaram’s (2009) work reminds us of the effects of technology's rapid proliferation on societies embedded with social and economic inequalities. Building on Sundaram (2009), I argue that the very access to these markets also makes the new screen ecology accessible in the form of low-cost mobile phones and software, enabling the diffusion of technology and creation of content. Sundaram (2009) locates this informal economy’s cultural, social and economic sites in India’s capital, New Delhi, which is also euphemistically known as its pirate capital. By drawing on urban and cultural theories, Sundaram (2009) explores Delhi’s ‘grey markets’ that indulge in the digital and mechanical reproduction of technology (hardware) and media (software, films, music). Sundaram (2009) explains how these markets make the technology accessible for more impoverished populations who cannot afford the cost of legal goods at the risk of being attacked by globalized elites, media and technology companies. This phenomenon, as Sundaram (2009, 3) argues, has given rise to Pirate Modernity, an ‘illicit form of urban globalization’ where ‘poorer urban populations increasingly inhabit non-legal spheres (unauthorized neighborhoods, squatter camps) and bypass legal, technological infrastructures (media, electricity).’

The informal media economy’s vitality can also be traced to countries facing heavy surveillance and censorship of cultural products. Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes (1989, 11), while studying the ‘origins, dynamics and the effects’ of the informal economy, suggested that it was impossible to confine the floating social borders that cross geographical limitations. Castells and Portes (1989) posited that the informal economy guaranteed freedom from over- regulation and presented a new opportunity for entrepreneurs from all classes. In the process, it has also emerged as an alternative for the media industry to reach out to the masses by circumnavigating censorship laws besides contributing to its growth in shape and size (Castells & Portes, 1989). As I show in chapter 5, both television and films are subject to censorship in India. However, the absence of censorship on the Indian NSE has provided an alternative space for creating content which would never make it into the heavily censored Indian film and television industries. By enabling the production of certain forms of content that may be considered objectionable on its counterparts, the Indian NSE performs a crucial role in formalizing the ‘informal’ transactions. 12

Athique (2018) invokes the concept of an integrated commodity to articulate the plurality of transactions that are conducted within the contemporary digital economy. The bundling of social, cultural and economic transactions, Athique (2018) argues, is the platform economy's distinctive nature. Contextualizing the plurality of the broader digital media economy within the ambit of Indian NSE, it is, then, safe to suggest that the Indian NSE assumes an ambivalent site whereby it mediates formal and informal transactions by enabling innovation and creativity through the movement of creators from Youtube to Netflix and films. In doing so, the Indian NSE blurs the sort of formal divides in the West, between social media entertainment and portals and UGC and PGC (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). By formalizing critical metrics for measuring popularity through likes, views, subscriptions, and subscribers, social media entertainment facilitates the development of informal social networks with portals and films.

As I show in chapter 5-7, the informality of these social networks is formalized by creating work opportunities with portals and films. Thus, I argue that the formal and informal aspects of the NSE provide an alternative pathway to pursue media careers.

Critical Media Industries Studies and Neigbouring Approaches

As outlined by Timothy Havens, Amanda Lotz and Serra Tinic (2009), the CMIS has its roots in cultural studies and operates within the broader contours of media studies. The framework promotes ‘critical analysis of how individuals, institutions, and industries produce and circulate cultural forms in historically and geographically contextualized ways’ (Herbert, Lotz and Punathambekar, 2020, 11). The CMIS framework was developed to balance the lopsided attention given to media texts and audiences and explore how power operates within a local, regional, national and global setting, media industries, and labor communities.

CMIS allows multi-scalar perspectives to analyze digital transformation in the Indian media industry with a particular focus on creator careers. In the context of the previous politics of favoritism and systemic inequalities that pervade in the Indian film and television industries (Mehta, 2012; Punathambekar, 2013), my research articulates the dynamic ways in which creators are using the online media to enter the changing Indian media industry. As Punathambekar (2013) notes in his study on Bollywood’s production culture, the industry’s reliance on ‘family and friend circles’ create a hostile atmosphere for newcomers seeking to find work. Similarly, the lack of talent and content diversity in the Indian television industry 13

has also affected creators’ morale, who perceive the NSE as a space for opportunity and career growth.

I argue that power needs to be studied from both the top-down and the bottom-up to understand how creators negotiate social media’s algorithmic uncertainties and streaming services’ decision-making practices. The CMIS framework helps me to show how Indian online media has morphed into a distinct hybrid space for experimentation of revenue models, value propositions and content strategies that contests the traditional media’s industrial practices and creates more opportunities for new and existing media practitioners, but also produces distinct concerns regarding the uncertainty of securing those opportunities as well as eliciting conformity to deep-rooted patriarchy. A CMIS approach helps navigate these complexities by encouraging a multi-scalar approach at a particular site of study to parse out its links with other screen industries.

Having interviewed creative professionals and industry executives from studios, technology companies and start-up companies, media industry researchers Curtin, Holt and Sanson (2014) convey the anxieties and the perceptions of media practitioners concerning the ‘digital media industry.’ These conversations form part of the ‘industry lore,’ a term used by Timothy Havens (2008, cited in Burroughs, 2019, 3) to describe ‘the conventional knowledge among industry insiders about what kinds of media culture are and are not possible, and what audiences that culture will and will not attract’ while analyzing how the African American television is perceived by the international sales and programming executives.

The origins of such literature can be traced within the broader critical media studies scholarship (Ang, 1991; Caldwell, 2008; Gitlin, 1983; Havens and Lotz, 2012) that is explicitly concerned with how media practitioners ‘construct audiences’ and develop their content strategies. In particular, Gitlin’s (1983) work highlights how ‘industry lore’ helps shape television executives and producers’ decisions. I build on these interventions to describe the effects of the ‘industry lore’ of NSE practitioners on Indian creator culture by exploring how creators draw distinctions between the labor performed in the television industry and the NSE.

Unlike its trajectory in the United States, Netflix was neither the first portal to create high- quality content nor the first to enter India. The prevalence of social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook in 2008–09 mediated the content being created on them and that of Indian media industries as a whole. The sketches, stand-up comedy shows and web-shows 14

created by the early online creators such as TVF and AIB, amongst others, challenged social and cultural dogmas by deploying tropes of parody and satire (Kumar, 2015), the success of which created avenues for collaboration with film producers and digital media services (Kay, 2018).

The platforms and portals, in sum, adorn a distinct site of disjuncture as well as continuity – they are part of the media industries, but are diversifying far more in content, talent and genre sources. The term ‘industry’ is indicative of the set of ‘social and textual arrangements, sites of enactment, and other dramaturgies of interaction, reflection, and reflexivity’ that media scholar Nitin Govil (2013, 176) urges us to consider while exploring the factors that contribute to a production of a media industry. Govil (2013) stresses that media industries scholarship needs to broaden the range of practices that constitute as ‘industrial’ in order for an industry to be recognized. I borrow from Govil’s (2013) critical commentary to argue that the social and economic exchanges between the creators, platform, portals, and intermediaries in the form of capital (cultural, financial, data metrics of viewership and subscription), content, and talent are strong indicators of industrial practices. The online content creation practices are also carried out through continuous engagement with other forms of media production (film, television) in production sites and creators and content.

In articulating these dynamics, my study contributes to advancing disciplinary knowledge by showing how social media entertainment can be included in the CMIS approach by focusing on the blurring of boundaries between film, television, and online media. My exploration of such power dynamics has similarities to Cantor’s (2017) research on the everyday struggle of television producers as they negotiated with social structure and organizational controls. While Cantor (2017, xxxvi) focuses her study on the occupational group of producers, I rely on the self-perceptions and content-creation practices of a diverse workforce that includes writers, actors, producers, platform/platform executives and talent agents working on the platform economy to analyze their ‘‘social’ construction of reality’ (2017, xxxvi). Alongside the CMIS literature review, other pertinent literature is reviewed in the relevant chapters.

I situate the CMIS approach alongside the neighboring significant approaches – political economy, neo-institutionalist, substantivist, and business management approaches – that have been used to study Indian media. There is certainly overlap in these approaches, but I argue that CMIS’s focus on creator labor conditions offers the most appropriate framework for studying the micropolitics of labor in the Indian NSE. I argue that the CMIS approach offers a 15

mid-level framework to capture the micropolitics between organizational practices and production practices. In comparison to neighbouring approaches, the CMIS framework offers a theoretical background to investigate and assess the power dynamics concerning online creator labor conditions. Besides the multi-scalar approach, it is the CMIS’s focus on the domain of power relating to creator autonomy and working conditions that distinguish it from other significant approaches that have been used to study the Indian media economy.

I now discuss the relationship between CMIS and other approaches (political economy, neo- institutionalist, substantivist, and business management approaches) to show how my study benefits from the previous body of literature that has studied Indian media using these approaches. As I will show, depending upon the focus on the domain of power, different approaches can be used to study the Indian media economy.

The political economy approach, for instance, investigates the relationship between cultural industries and politics (Mosco, 1996). Such an exploration is useful for exploring and analyzing the national and global effects of political and economic processes on the media industries. More specifically, a political economy approach insists on the interdependence in media industries between the state and market forces.

A classic example of this approach is the work of media scholar Pradip Thomas (2010), who explores the state of the Indian media economy in three periods—colonial, post-colonial (1949- 85), and the new India (1986-2009). Thomas (2010) sees the Indian media as a product of State and private monopolies. In particular, Thomas (2010) argues that the Indian media was systematically used by, first, the colonial rulers, then the State, and eventually a combination of the State, few media conglomerates and industrial capitalists, respectively. In doing so, Thomas shows how power structures shape Indian media industries to fuel their interests. Thomas (2010, 2) says that a political economy approach to study Indian media is useful in understanding,

changes in the media terrain in India, the emergence of domestic media czars, external and internal policies that have led to media liberalization, India’s attempts at harmonization of its copyright laws with global rules, its position on trade in audio- visuals, the technocratic vision of lobbies such as the National Association for Software and Services Company (NASSCOM), the changing nature of labor in communications along with the significant media disjunctures in India—for instance, the media’s 16

treatment of poverty, and resistance by civil society to the dominant media and their representations are significant aspects that together make up the larger picture related to the political economy of communications in India.

Thomas (2012) carries his political economy into a treatment of the development of Indian Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), encompassing digital piracy, e- governance and the relationships between the public sector, the software industry and the mobile industry. Thomas (2012) argues that any understanding of digital media in India must take account of how Indians experience digital technologies. In exploring the contentious issues concerning the ascribing of intellectual property laws, the retribution of land for the Information Technology (IT) sector, the branding of informal cultural players as ‘cultural pirates,’ Thomas (2012) highlights the entrenched use of power and privilege from the Government as well as the privileged private sector players in controlling and influencing the sharing of digital technologies.

Another leading example is political economist Manjunath Pendakur’s (2013) rigorous analysis of the impact of Indian neo-liberal policy post-1991 on the Indian media and telecommunication industries. Pendakur (2013) argues that the opening of domestic industries for foreign direct investment, selling public assets to private investors, providing stimulus to private corporations for investment in the telecommunications and broadcasting sector, and facilitating global developments of Indian private industrialists exacerbated India’s class inequality.

Alternatively, a study on the Indian media industries can investigate the influence of politics in media ownership through a neo-institutionalist approach. Media ownership is a complex terrain, especially in India’s case, given its vast geography and scattered linguistic diversity (Parthasarthy & Srinivas, 2019). India’s regional diversity offers tremendous scope for regional and national political parties that are looking to benefit from its revenue streams and its overall reach (Jeffrey, 1997, 2000; Parthasarthy & Srinivas, 2016, 2019). Such an investigation into the media-politics nexus is explored through a neo-institutionalist perspective that exemplifies how political parties use media ownership as a means for controlling the dissemination of content and creating loyalties with citizens in exchange for content.

Stark evidence of such an approach can be found in the works of media scholars Jeffrey (1997), Parthasarthy and Srinivas (2016, 2019). Through interviews with newsreaders, journalists, 17 editors across rural India, media scholar Jeffrey’s (1997) meticulous analysis of the Indian newspaper industry post-1977 highlights the growth of regional newspapers, marked by the rise in localization of news, strategical mobilization of resources, and close ties with national advertisers. Jeffrey (2000) charts a textured analysis of the complicated symphony between politics, capital, class, a national and regional identity that has led to the rise of the Indian newspaper industry—at a time when newspaper industries across the world were struggling to retain the decline in readerships. Jeffery (2000, 58) analyzes the expansion of circulations in the Indian languages, the rise in advertising by pursuing regional, national and global interests in an attempt to ‘homogenize regional variation in language, deeply embed India’s ‘official’ languages, and at the same time foster ideas of Indian nationhood.’

Parthasarthy and Srinivas (2019) expose the nexus between politicians and media in their study on the ownership patterns within the television distribution networks in India. Sighting the recent example of Reliance Industries Group’s (RIG) takeover of the two largest cable distribution multiservice operators in 2019, Parthasarthy and Srinivas (2019) expose the close links of political ownership in the cable distribution business to argue how the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) word of caution against political ownership, market monopoly and cross-media ownership were often ignored to favor select private companies. Thus, the neo-institutionalist approach is valuable in investigating the role and influence of politics in informing conflicting judgments to the operations of territorial media.

Whereas both political economy and neo-institutionalist approaches emphasize the varying degree of political power over market forces, a substantivist approach is useful in exploring the social value of the economic transactions (Athique, 2018). A substantivist approach, essentially, encourages a researcher to look beyond the intended or predetermined economic value of the commodity and explore the commodification of formal and informal social relations that are enshrined within the economic exchange. Such an approach explores the integration of the sum total of social transactions that are made possible within a commodity system.

In that sense, all the three approaches discussed above offer a top-down perspective of the internal and external forces that influence the media transactions. Specifically, these approaches help us to assess the operations of power through examination of the historical and institutional frameworks, as well as the social transactions concerning media production and consumption. In contrast, I use the CMIS framework to present a bottom-up perspective of the 18

NSE production culture through a deep-dive on the formal and informal interactions between NSE agents (creators, intermediaries, portals, platforms) and with film and television industries.

Alternatively, the business management perspective deals with media economics and offers a succinct account of the size and scale of media businesses and industries (Kohli-Khandekar, 2010, Sundarajan, 2016). Media scholar Vanita Kohli-Khandekar (2010) dwells on these aspects in her book, in which she offers novel perspectives on the functioning of print, radio, television, advertising, out of home, events, telecommunications and internet media businesses in India.

Besides Kohli-Khandekar (2010), another example of business management perspective can be traced in Sundarajan’s (2016) work on the rise of crowd-based capitalism details the cause and effects of the sharing economy on the accommodation, transportation and labor sectors due to the rapid advancement of digital technologies is another solid example of a business- management approach. These works emphasize the combination of market power and technological power to offer a broad view of the impact of technology and business decisions on market forces.

The four approaches (political economy, neo-institutionalist, substantivist, business management) discussed here exemplify the positions from which Indian media industries can be studied. While these approaches offer rich and deep insights into the various industrial, social and political agendas that guide the business of media, the multi-scalar perspective that CMIS offers is critical for investigating the varied degrees of interdependencies between NSE agents situated at different levels within the contours of media production.

In approaching the thesis from a CMIS framework, my work contributes to a small but significant corpus of work on creator labor within the Indian context (Upadhyay, 2008; Booth, 2008; Lorenzen & Taube, 2010; Tripathy, 2012,2013,2017; Majumdar, 2015). Booth’s (2008) seminal work on the precarity of Indian Hindi film industry musicians reminds us of the invisible labor that shaped the development of Hindi film songs between 1947-1990. Relying extensively on interviews with popular and less well-known musicians in Mumbai, Booth (2008) traces the anonymous labor of studio musicians and composers, who mostly came from Goa with training in Western music, to highlight how the dominant use of play-back singing, technological advances in synchronization of songs with images in a film and electronic 19

rendering of music made their jobs precarious. That these musicians were offered no formal agreements for their, often long unstipulated hours of labor contributed to their overall precarity.

Much like the audio-visual industries, the Indian music industry has been affected by the advent of production, distribution and consumption of music over the internet. Through interviews with diverse stakeholders within the Indian music industry in Mumbai and Delhi in 2018 and analysis of Government publications and trade press literature, Ithurbide (2020) analyzes the restructuring of the music industry, marked by the entry of Indian telecom companies (Vodafone, Reliance Jio, Bharti-Airtel) as well as multinational corporations (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) has altered the economic models of the music business. Ithurbide (2020) deliberates that the entry of these companies through the launch of streaming music platforms or collaborations with streaming music platforms is meant to support their primary business activities concerning user data and network services. As these companies pursue the interests of the masses by pushing homogenous genres of music, independent musicians and less popular genres suffer. This suffering is exacerbated by the drop in the cost of price per song, which many creators are willing to accept in exchange for the reach of platforms. Furthermore, the amended Indian Copyright Act 2012, which finally recognized the music composers and writers as the first owners and beneficiaries of royalty, has failed to support the creators owing to the lack of awareness amongst musicians about their rights, lack of clarity in profit-distribution between labels and creators and lopsided power dynamics between musicians and labels (Ithurbide, 2020).

Within the film industry, marginalization of creator labor occurs at the expense of privileging family and close friends in matters related to film financing, distribution and casting, as pointed out by Lorenzen and Taube (2010) in exploring the congested network of overlapping business and family relationships within the Hindi film industry. Through a combination of interviews and secondary qualitative data from varied online sources, Lorenzen and Taube (2010) use the metaphor of a banyan tree to describe the nepotistic network structures within the Bollywood industry, in comparison to the less entangled Hollywood networks.

The very selective preferential treatments that these networks offer reduces the Indian media industry to a prism that refracts a spectrum of social and economic inequalities and render certain jobs invisible. Media scholar Majumdar (2015) points out the conspicuous invisibility of work performed by ‘stunt artists, body doubles, dancers, junior artists, makeup artists, 20

lower-end technicians, and spot boys’ despite their critical involvement in film production. Majumdar’s (2015) work reminds us of the deeply embedded social and class hierarchies that creator labor has to face for due recognition and compensation.

The prosaic nature of these divides is a reflection of India’s deeply hierarchical society. Ratnakar Tripathy (2007, 2012, 2013), the first media scholar to analyze the social, economic and cultural phenomenon of the Bhojpuri film industry, shows the presence of language and class conflicts in his seminal work on the production and consumption practices of Bhojpuri cinema. Although the Bhojpuri language possesses similarities with the Hindi language (it is adjudged the status of a dialect of Hindi), Bhojpuri cinema is conspicuously ‘invisible’ to the educated middle classes located in the Hindi heartland (Tripathy, 2012). This is because Bhojpuri cinema and its audience have been perceived as crude, and unsophisticated, a fact that Tripathy (2013) argues, is a result of the disdain from the educated middle class. Through extensive fieldwork between 2007-11, Tripathy (2013, 161) explores and analyzes the technological, economic, social and cultural complexities to narrate the distinctive phases of the Bhojpuri film industry from an early decline to the rise and transformation of the Bhojpuri film industry as a cinema that ‘voluntarily positions itself at a decidedly lower cultural rung’ by focusing on stories of migration, and rural-urban conflicts—stories, that Tripathy (2013) echoes, are central to the new aspiring middle class and missing in Bollywood due to the industry’s preference towards urban themes.

Examining the gulf of socio-economic divides within labor and media also calls for a broader conceptualization of the Indian media economy—one that accommodates the much-celebrated Information Technology (IT) sector, exemplified for employing meritorious labor class from all sections of the Indian society. However, Upadhya’s (2008) seminal findings on the social and economic class of the IT workers employed in Bangalore suggests that this is not the case. Through an ethnographic study of software professionals in Bangalore between January 2004- June 2005, Upadhya (2008) concluded that most software engineers originate from middle- class, educated families. Upadhya (2008) argues that the industry’s representation of the workforce is in contrast with its rhetoric of opening equal job opportunities. Upadhya (2008, 1867) posits,

For instance, the industry’s emphasis on the need to improve primary education, while laudable, also has the effect of deflecting attention away from the question of exclusionary processes in employment. It is also based on the individualist liberal 21

assumption that all that is required is to provide every child with an education that will enable him or her to ‘compete’ on an equal footing. This notion, like the ideological opposition to positive discrimination of any kind, reflects a complete denial of the unequal distribution, by class and caste (and other divisions such as gender and religious community), of the cultural, social, and economic capital required to become an IT professional.

My thesis borrows from Upadhya’s (2008) learning in the sense that despite the increase in internet usage and decrease in data costs, the lopsided socio-economic growth of India shows that few creators are privileged over others in terms of access to capital and resources required to forge a career in NSE.

The omission of caste politics in this thesis is due to the fact that my thesis focuses on the motivations of creators for creating content on platforms and portals and various social and material relationships that the creators derive with platforms, portals and intermediaries to pursue a creative career. My cohort of creators also signaled more towards gender imbalance than caste discrimination. The varying degrees of resistance that women have to face in working within the Indian NSE are discussed at length in chapter 4. For this reason, while any specific observations on a creator’s caste in benefitting his/her career within the Indian NSE will be superficial as far as the thesis objectives and findings are concerned, I do acknowledge that majority of the cohort of creators I interviewed as well as considered for the thesis belong to the educated middle class or upper-middle class.

Certain sections of the Indian Penal Code and Prevention of Atrocities Act forbid from asking people about their caste. Of course, it also depends on the context but as I highlighted in the introduction, the role of caste was not as crucial to the thesis inquiry as was the informality governed by privilege of social relations. Given that my research questions did not pose direct questions of caste to respondents it would be unscientific to guess the caste of a person by looking at their last name. The lack of information regarding the role of caste in NSE hiring practices, coupled by an ethical clearance that only allowed for explicit enquiries related to industrial and cultural practices makes the discussion on caste, however critical it is, speculatory. For these reasons, I have refrained from making token comments in the thesis. Thus, while analyzing the influence of caste in the NSE is beyond the scope of this thesis, the thesis must be read with the caveat that the influence of gender and class does privilege certain creators over others. These works continue to remind us about the political, social and cultural 22

specificities within which India is situated. These studies point to the need for closer investigations of the Indian media economy.

Nevertheless, this acknowledgment does not dilute the argument in the thesis that the NSE offers opportunity for individuals and organizations that are not intrinsically linked to the media industries. As I argue in this thesis, the metrics of viewership and subscriber data has enabled the entrepreneurs to use the data for social and material gains and challenge the close networked structure of the traditional media industries—a structure that was responsible for protecting a network of family and friends with repeated opportunities irrespective of economic failures.

The rise of the new screen ecology created a space for emerging creators to show their talent against the backdrop of the closely guarded film and television industry. I argue that the sudden popularity and success of creators like AIB, TVF and many other actors and above-the-line workers, whom I discuss throughout the thesis, and content created on both social media platforms as well as portals, has led these industries to reflect on the need for innovation in talent and content. Furthermore, while this process of transformation has its shortcomings, such as the aftermath of the #Metoo movement, the social media’s algorithmic culture that meant creators created more content than they got paid for (Baym, 2015), and the reliance of portals on Bollywood films and legacy content, the advent of new screen ecology has opened new pathways for content production and distribution.

Defining India’s New Screen Ecology

I use the term ‘new screen ecology’ to explore its connotations regarding the Indian media landscape, its historic use and its limitations. The concept of studying media systems as an ecology can be traced back to 1968 when Neil Postman delivered a speech at the National Council of Teachers of English in Milwaukee on ‘Media Ecology: The English of the Future.’ While distinguishing media ecology from the subject of English to argue against the latter’s replacement with the media ecology terminology, Postman (1970) identified media ecology as a field of inquiry. In doing so, he conceptualized media ecology as the exploration of dynamic human communication systems. Five years later, while evaluating the influence of disciplines such as mathematics (information theory and cybernetics), sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, semantics and philosophy in the study of communication systems, Nystrom’s (1973, 1) thesis defined media ecology as 23

the transactions between individual and reality, between one person and another, between individual and group, and between-group and culture, and it seeks to identify the role played in those transactions by the media – communication structures, processes, techniques, and technologies – through which they are conducted.

I build on these contributions to explore the social relations shaped by the advent of technology. The emphasis on the terms ‘new screen’ and ‘ecology’ highlights the use of technology in developing formal and informal, social and economic interrelationships within the Indian media industries. A broader and related understanding of the term ‘ecology’ can be traced to media scholar Baltruschat’s (2010) work on the effects of digital transformation in the production and audience in Europe and North America. Baltruschat (2010, 18) uses the term ‘media production ecology’ to explore the close circuit of relationships between the following cultural mediators in shaping the global film and television cultures:

producers, broadcasters, advertisers, sponsors, funding agents, cultural policy analysts and—in regards to multi-platform media—digital content developers, telecommunications service providers and interactive media users (audience members who use interactive technologies such as computers and wireless communication devices to engage with media texts).

Similarly, my use of the term ‘ecology’ encompasses platforms, portals and the content creation and distribution talent, and intermediaries behind those services–social and digital, local and foreign services. It includes open-ended platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and media services that operate as traditional media-like gatekeepers, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.

In making a case for studying the media as ecology, I also build on the previous studies (Cunningham, 2015; Cunningham et al., 2016) that have afforded similar distinctions. While referring to the global delivery potential of digital content platforms such as YouTube, Netflix and Amazon Prime, Stuart Cunningham (2015) was the first scholar to distinguish the platforms and portals as the NSE. As Cunningham and Craig (2018, 13) argue, an ecological approach implies, 24

investigating the interdependencies amongst its elements: mapping the platforms and affordances, content innovation and creative labor, monetization and management, new forms of media globalization, and critical cultural concerns raised by this nascent media industry.

By ecology, I allude to the interactions that human agents such as creators, intermediaries and platform/portal executives develop between themselves and film/television industry personnel, similar to Cunningham and Craig’s (2019) understanding of mapping the interdependences between the elements that constitute an ecology. A key but significant difference in the application of the term ‘ecology’ between Cunningham and Craig (2019) and my work is a clear influence of languages, film and television industries and the dynamism between platforms and portals in shaping the social and economic transactions within NSE.

My ecological and multi-scalar approach is informed by Athique et al.’s (2017, 2018) edited volumes on the Indian media economy that explore the interdependency between media businesses and economic sectors. In the second volume, Parthasarathi (2018, 2) stresses the need for an ecological approach to studying the ‘burgeoning, complex relationships between the media sector and other social, symbolic, and financial structures.’ Parthasarathi (2018) argues that the distinctive nature of the Indian media economy arises from the rich and varied degree of interdependences between media and other markets where media serves the role of logistics or service.

Contrary to a sector-by-sector approach, an analysis of these interdependences requires encompassing of varied transactional processes where media is directly involved and is shaped by social and material exchanges (Parthasarathi, 2018). Athique et al. (2017, 2018) stress for a multi-layered analysis to determine the varying levels at which media is mediated to highlight the dynamism of the Indian media economy. Similar to Athique et al. (2018), I argue that the CMIS multi-scalar ecological approach to study the Indian online audio-visual landscape is useful in assessing the impact of technology on the Indian media industries.

I argue that the introduction of YouTube and Facebook, before the advent of any portals, gave rise to the conditions for the emergence of the NSE. As a result, they have become a place for exercising greater creativity, autonomy and freedom from censorship as opposed to films or television. The distinctiveness of the NSE also comes from its ability to address the inadequacies of television content, and to produce innovative content at the regional and 25

national levels, and create opportunities to enable the movement of creators from platforms and portals to films while embracing the precarity that comes with uncertain working conditions. Ultimately, the CMIS approach helps me by using a multi-layered approach (Herbert, Lotz and Punathambekar, 2020) that parses out interrelationships between mediums, creators and intermediaries while maintaining the transactions on the NSE as a distinct site for study. In exploring the meaning-making practices of the creators within the media industries, I situate my study within the broader production studies literature that has attempted to explore the industrial, social and cultural contexts within which media production, circulation and consumption take place (Upadhya, 2008; Lorenzen and Taube, 2010; Caldwell, 2012; Ganti, 2013; Punathambekar, 2013; Cantor, 2017).

However, it is significant to clarify here that my reading of entrepreneurs such as TVF, Dice Media, Bhuvan Bam, Bhartiya Digital Party (BhaDiPa) is different from Ganti’s (2013) reading of creative elites of Bollywood who pursue socially and culturally elite audience for two key reasons. First, unlike Ganti’s (2013) cohort, my cohort of entrepreneurs are marked by high degrees of collaboration and decentralization. The content that my cohort creates is a result of the entrepreneurial set-up that relies on creativity from its employees who may not have professional expertise in media. It is driven more by experimentation on the job than a systematic application of acquired education in filmmaking. Second, these creators operate on social media, which is very sensitive to viewership. Owing to free access to Youtube, the platform drives the majority of online video consumption in India (EY, 2019). As evidenced in the introduction as well, access to cheap internet and mobile phones is not a luxury in India.

While the use of the English language is symbolic of upward social mobility and is used to some extent on platforms and portals (Kay, 2019), the majority of the cohort of creators I have interviewed create content in other languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi. Some of my creator cohorts intentionally refrain from catering to the minority elite English-speaking Indian audience as it is not the language of the masses. Thus, I have concentrated on the dynamics between creators, platforms, portals and intermediaries. These are the key aspects of the NSE that show how India is distinctive. This means that I have not focused in-depth on relevant aspects of the NSE in general, such as algorithmic culture, platform/portal infrastructure, the impact of advertising in financing the content of social media creators, and the new screen ecology audience as they are not a central part of my analysis. 26

Thesis Method

I have studied the Indian NSE through a combination of semi-structured interviews with online media practitioners, discourse analysis of interviews, textual evidence of select online media texts and analysis of trade press literature and industry reports.

The 66 interviewees can be broken down into the following groups:

 creators (n=45) who have practiced online content creation in the capacity of vlogger, writer, stand-up comedian, director, producer, actor, and founders of media companies operating on platforms and portals  intermediaries (n=9), such as talent agents, casting agents and multi-channel networks operating within the Indian new screen ecology  platform and portal executives (n=12), such as chief operating officers, chief executive officers, content heads and creative producers.

This range of interviewees is consistent with my research questions and has enabled me to better understand the extent of the mutability of the NSE roles. The creator culture within the NSE is morphing in ways whereby the writers become directors; talent agents become producers, stand-up comedians become writers or actors, vloggers become actors, intermediaries become producers and so on. I kept the cohort diverse by conducting interviews with respondents from diverse locations like Kolkata (n=12), Delhi (n=1), Chennai (n=1) and Ahmedabad (n=2). Apart from the Hindi and English language content creators, my cohort also includes respondents who create content in diverse languages such as Marathi (n=1), Bengali (n=12), Gujarati (n=2) and Tamil (n=1). While gender diversity within the Indian media industries remains a constant concern (see chapter 5), I have tried my best to boost the sample size of female respondents (n=14) for the study. Even so, I do believe that the current number of female respondents limits the overall equity and scope of the research findings.

I used a combination of purposive and snowball sampling to constitute the interview cohort. As I developed my understanding of the NSE, it became clear that I needed to interview representatives of the key components of the NSE, such as creators, intermediaries and platform/portal executives. This was easier said than done because the NSE respondents were difficult to interview, given the lack of reciprocity between academia and the industry. There was little or no perceived benefit for the highly entrepreneurial creators and intermediaries 27

working on platforms/portals (Cunningham and Craig, 2019) as well as the privacy-driven portal executives, who were unwilling to share their strategies due to a fear of giving data to competitors. My prior experience as a media practitioner for three years with Viacom18 Media, a joint venture between Reliance Industries and Viacom, was influential in identifying some of the micro media industry transformations and finding respondents for the study.

These interviews were conducted in three waves. In the first wave, I was recruited to join supervisor Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham’s Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project DP160100086. As a project contributor, I conducted three semi-structured interviews in Mumbai and Ahmedabad and one interview over WhatsApp, as creator Sorabh Pant was on tour. WhatsApp was selected for convenience, as it is widely used in India. It also allowed Sorabh Pant to respond at his convenience.

In the second wave, 15 email interviews with online creators and platform/portal executives originating from Mumbai, Bhopal, Ahmedabad and Delhi were conducted from Brisbane between October 2017 and January 2018. Of the total 51 semi-structured interviews, two were conducted over the telephone. Finally, 48 semi-structured interviews were conducted during fieldwork in Mumbai and Kolkata between March 2018 and August 2018, except for one email interview, conducted in January 2019 with a multi-channel network executive. Conducting email interviews before in-depth interviews helped in mapping the emerging trends and framing research questions and interview questions with precision. All interviewees agreed to have their interview content attributed to them. The three-wave approach helped me to cover gaps and get close to a good purposive sample. Most semi-structured interviews lasted between 60 and 90 minutes. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analyzed along with email interviews using NVivo software.

The textual evidence is based on a study of some of the most notable features of TV-style and narrative construction and a comparison of themes in soap operas and online series. I note the detailed studies of such textual aspects in chapter 4. However, my primary focus is on the industrial and cultural logics that drive storytelling in both formats. I draw on textual evidence to support the creators’ understanding of the industrial and cultural limitations and/or affordances of each medium. Long-form popular content on online media such as TVF Pitchers, Permanent Roommates and Little Things is used as textual evidence to compare its formal and aesthetical storytelling techniques with popular television fiction content. I have also relied on popular press articles such as those from the Huffington Post, Quint and Caravan 28

to keep track of events in the Indian media industry. Alongside these articles, industry reports from accounting firms such as KPMG and EY and academic institutions such as the Mudra Institute of Communications Ahmedabad (MICA) were sought for industry data.

Much of the Hindi film industry’s data in trade magazines lack accurate statistics, owing to the lack of a ‘centralized tracking agency’ (Ganti, 2012, 37) and the NSE fares no better in its comparison for similar reasons. Like the Indian film industries, the NSE lacks a central body that can account for the size and scale of the ecology and provide numbers on the performance of platforms and portals. Even in cases where the industry reports have circulated data on platform-portal viewership data, the figures have been sourced from third-party research companies. As Govil (2016) concludes from his investigation of the first Indian media and entertainment report in 2000, consultancy reports on media in India project optimism to promote a vision for the future. A characteristic of these reports is the aesthetical visualization of data, which are meant to depict India’s readiness to compete and complement global media economies (Govil, 2016). These reasons have limited my ability to offer a more thorough comparison of platforms/portals on size, scale, and performance criteria.

Thesis Structure

This study investigates the rapid growth of the Indian NSE populated by over 40 platforms and portals in India – a much larger figure than in most other countries, which provide the production milieu for new as well as existing voices and assist in producing new content/formats for a previously underserved, growing demographic – urbanist, cosmopolitan, and educated – under conditions of production and regulation that allow for greater freedom to experiment. The rapid uptake of technology by creators has produced remarkable changes in intellectual property management and funding structures (Holt and Sanson, 2013). I adopt a multi-scalar approach to investigate the interactions between platforms/portals, intermediaries and creators for the reasons discussed below.

As media industries continue to compete for audience attention, viewership data become a central point of content creation and diversification strategy for both platforms/portals and creators. The advent of social media platforms has opened opportunities to brand value propositions – a power that previously was only afforded to broadcasters and studios. I investigate the consequence of the coexistence of varying degrees of power between platform, portals and creators by first mapping the industrial and cultural practices of 11 prominent 29 portals (Hotstar, Spuul, Hoichoi, Addatimes, TVFPlay, Reliance Jio, Zee5, Voot, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, AltBalaji) and two social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook) (see chapter 3). I argue that such a mapping practice can help to systematically decipher the complex interplay between platforms/portals as well as bring to the fore the contribution of the creators and intermediaries in enabling these social and textual transactions. This ‘helicopter- level’ approach of the NSE is crucial to answering Research Question 1, which focuses on the platforms/portals’ perspective.

Whereas the producers on television have typically traded their intellectual property rights to broadcasters, creators on YouTube and Facebook retain them. Furthermore, creators also use social media success as a ‘calling card’ for negotiation with prospective film producers and portal executives. Because creators practicing on social media have access to this data, they use it to negotiate their cultural and commercial transactions (Cunningham and Craig, 2019) across the media industries to further their growth prospects. Rather than fitting into the mould of the expectations set by gatekeepers, creators are challenging existing structures, leading the gatekeepers to adapt to the emerging trend. In other words, creators set the trend on social media through genre diversification, the flexibility of the content duration, performativity and themes, as is evident from the burst of Indian stand-up comedy shows and web series on the portals. Such a ‘ground-level’ approach is crucial to the answering of Research Question 2, as it helps me to assess the ways in which creators use the affordances of the NSE for their career growth.

For instance, consider the example of TVF’s journey from social media entertainers to launching a portal, as well as creating for other portals (discussed in greater detail in chapters 3 and 5). TVF’s web series Yeh Meri Family (2019) (This is My Family) was syndicated on Netflix (also available on its portal TVFPlay) while another web series, ImMature, was premiered at the Cannes film festival and will be part of one of the largest Indian media network Times Internet’s upcoming streaming platform, MX player (Rajesh, 2018). Similarly, online content company Arré (predominantly operating on social media) (see chapter 5) partnered with Times Internet’s upcoming streaming service MX Player to create an original comedy web-show Tathastu (So Be It!) (Rajesh, 2018), further highlighting the interdependencies between platforms and portals through creators and content. These examples evidence the need to investigate perspectives from platforms/portals and creators in order to answer the research questions. 30

Apart from the creators and platform/portal executives, intermediaries such as talent agents and multi-channel networks have played a significant role in blurring the platform–portal divide, transitioning from intermediaries to producers and investing in genre and talent that have contributed to the distinctive nature of the Indian NSE (see chapter 7). As a brief example of their contribution, consider intermediary OML, which has also produced web shows with their talent, Biswa Kalyan Rath and Zakir Khan. Both of these creators have transitioned from performing stand-up comedy to writing web series for Amazon Prime Video, namely Laakhon Mein Ek (One in a Million) and Hamare Chacha Vidhayak Hai (My Uncle is a Legislator), respectively. Zakir Khan and Biswa Kalyan Rath both enjoy a massive following on YouTube, with subscriber bases of over two million (Khan, 2011) and half a million (Rath, 2008), respectively.

What makes these collaborations distinct is the trust of global portals such as Amazon Prime in providing the opportunity to online content creators who have been popular predominantly for their stand-up comedy to drive long-form narratives on the portal in the capacity of a writer – and, in Zakir Khan’s case, also as an actor. In adopting a mid-level ‘top of the building’ approach, I investigate the role of intermediaries to address Research Question 3. In the next section, I offer a brief layout of the chapter narratives to answer the research questions.

Chapter Outlines

Chapter 2 chronicles the significant events that contributed to the emergence of the Indian NSE. In this chapter, I highlight the evolution of Indian mass-media and chart the growth of the film and television industry post-1991 to articulate the formal and informal relations within which the media industries operate. The evolution of the television industry also coincides with government initiatives to update technological infrastructure for the uptake of the internet. This ambitious technological upheaval leads to a chaotic and uneven spread of technologies, resulting in problems of the rural-urban divide and the digital divide. The chapter historicizes these developments and articulates how the arrival of telecom operator Reliance Jio transformed the landscape of internet penetration in India. Finally, chapter 2 builds on the critical media industries literature discussed in this chapter and situates the Indian NSE against a backdrop of formality and informality in Indian media markets.

Chapter 3 maps the market dynamics of diverse streaming media services operating in India and addresses Research Question 1 concerning the industrial strategies of platforms and 31

portals. By analyzing the various content strategies, distribution mechanisms, ownership patterns and revenue models, this chapter offers a descriptive overview of the platform economy and the distinct value propositions offered by that each of these platforms in terms of shaping the contours of the Indian NSE. In particular, this chapter focuses on the industrial practices of 13 dominant local, transnational and global streaming platforms and portals and their relationship with content creators, whose origins and practices form a critical base for analysis in future chapters. I explore the digital infrastructures and market forces that are determining the platform economy in India. In providing an overview of the dominant streaming media services in the marketplace and their distinct value propositions, I also point to the interdependency between platforms, portals and creators, and examine the subsequent role of intermediaries in connecting the creators with portals.

Chapter 4 critically analyzes the various issues that have prompted select creators to focus their creative energies on internet-based content. The chapter shows that because a growing segment of Indian content creators is disillusioned by the programming and industrial practices of television, they are increasingly embracing digital delivery platforms as the preferred outlets for their creative expression. The chapter examines the everyday practices of the television industry and compares the formal and aesthetic qualities of their textual artifacts with the NSE, as these professionals navigate the larger structural tensions between television and digital media in India. Investigating this issue is significant for my thesis, as the internet came at a time when television was already available to the audio-visual content creators as a medium for expressing their creativity. It is therefore critical to analyze the factors that prompted the shift of talent from television to the online medium and, at the same time, made it more appealing for emerging creators. This chapter addresses Research Questions 1 and 2.

Chapter 5 demonstrates evidence of creator mobility from social media to films and portals. I articulate the porosity in creator labor and production culture practices between social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook), content, portals and films. This chapter also discusses how creators deal with precarity. I highlight the multimedia labor approach of Indian online creators to discuss the various ways in which the creators perform agentic subjectivity and embrace precarity. At the same time, I analyze the social conditions of their work to highlight the precarious conditions that force them to adopt multi-platform labor. Overall, the chapter offers insights on the key aspects that demonstrate how the NSE has influenced the Indian media landscape by opening up new 32

avenues and opportunities for emerging creators facing a backlash from traditional media industries over creative hegemony, censorship and nepotistic practices. Discussion themes include quotidian practices, identity construction of creators, non-hierarchical corporate structures and localization practices, some of which also form the basis for discussion in future chapters. Issues concerning NSE, such as censorship and treatment of women creators, are raised. This chapter addresses Research Question 2 in particular and is crucial to an understanding of Research Questions 1 and 3.

Chapter 6 expands the theme of regionalization and localization practices within the Indian NSE. In this chapter, I discuss the emergence of multilingual online content and its creation practices by regional online content creators, platforms and portals that go beyond the established practices of traditional regional media industries and the notion of ‘catch-up television’ (Chauhan, 2017). In doing so, I show how the ‘localization’ (Brickell and Datta, 2011) strategy of platforms/portals as well as the ‘translocal’ diasporic consumption (Athique, 2005) is strongly influenced by the creators emanating from regional spaces and creating content in their native languages (Mukherjee, 2012). Through a primary focus on online content creation practices in Bengali and Marathi languages, I explore their ‘local,’ ‘regional,’ ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ appeal, and the subsequent blurring of boundaries between ‘regionalization’ and ‘localization’ as they imagine communities beyond national or regionally drawn borders. This chapter addresses Research Question 2 by highlighting how the spatial imaginations of the NSE, and the ‘ethical markers’ adopted by creators emanating from particular regions, are useful for commercializing their creative expressions.

In chapter 7, I show how intermediaries are increasingly gaining more prominence as architects of the platform economy, owing to their ability to first spot, represent and assist talent in building career trajectory using social media affordances, and second use online popularity as a means to secure deals with local and global streaming platforms such as Hotstar and Amazon Prime. The popularity of online content creators and platforms among audiences has also led intermediaries such as talent agents and multi-channel networks (MCNs) to reassess their responsibilities and business models to widen their commercial opportunities (Boyle, 2018) by operating as producers, as well as diversifying their investments in media and talent-related ventures. I limit the scope of the study of intermediaries to MCNs (Lobato, 2016) and talent agents (Roussel, 2016) to focus on human intervention on online media. Buoyed by the increase in creation and consumption of online content, MCNs and talent agents have 33

restructured their value propositions to function as a one-stop-shop for talent scouting, content productions and other media and talent-related management activities. In highlighting the influence of intermediaries in playing an active role as a broker and producer and a creator within the Indian NSE, this chapter addresses Research Question 3, although its findings also broadly cater to Research Questions 1 and 2. It highlights the social interrelationships between the portals, platforms and film industries that intermediaries create through the NSE.

Chapter 2 Overview of the Indian Audio-visual Media Ecology

In this chapter, I analyze the significant events that led to the emergence and growth of the Indian audio-visual sector (films and television). The principal argument that drives this chapter narrative is the co-evolution of Indian formal and informal media economies that led to the consolidation of the Indian NSE. Just as the informal means of finance, social relations, cable and satellite distribution led to the formalization of film and television industries, the Indian NSE distinctiveness is driven by formalization shaped by the ‘outsiders’ emanating from UGC platforms, local and global players (intermediaries, portals).

Within this ambit, I focus on an emerging segment of monetizing online content creators that situate themselves alongside informal (pirated, vernacular) and formal (established media companies) content on social media and offer diverse ways of imagining India through innovation in content and creation practices. As I show, the failure of corporatization in resolving the informal dynamics of the Indian film and television industries led creators to look at NSE as an alternative medium for expression. I argue that these creators’ early practices on Indian NSE, operate distinctively in comparison to the formal divides in the US between PGC driven Hollywood, television and UGC driven social media entertainment (see Cunningham and Craig, 2019).

Such a perspective helps us look beyond the digital transformation in Indian screen industries as a mere replication of continuity in the form of ‘oligopolistic tendency, increase in content and volume of telecommunications, and American players’ (see Bouquillon, 2020). By widening the inquiry of digital transformation to platforms, I highlight how a closer analysis of history and the contemporary state of film, broadcast, platforms and portals sector reveals the similar but much more complex informal-formal linkages determined by platform-portal- intermediary-creator dynamics. In doing so, I respond to research question 1 concerning the effects of NSE on the Indian media industry and the need to examine both platforms and portals.

Present Film, Television and Online Media Landscape

The Indian audio-visual media industries (film, television, online) together represented revenue of US$16.1 billion in 2019 (KPMG, 2020). While the contribution seems small compared with 35

the overall Indian Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $US2.8 trillion in 2019 (EY, 2019), the industries employed 2.6 million people in 2019 (Deloitte, 2020).

In 2019, the television industry employed 1.8 million people with total revenue of US$34,468 million (Deloitte, 2020). As of 2018, with 64 percent penetration, television is watched by 197 million Indian households, encompassing some 836 million individuals (EY, 2019). One reason for high television consumption is that it is still construed as a co-viewing medium (EY, 2018, 40). Of the 197 million households, rural India accounts for 99 million homes with 52 percent penetration, 17 percent higher than urban India (EY, 2019).

The Indian film sector generated total revenue of US$13,189 million and employed 736,000 people in 2019 (Deloitte, 2020). Despite being the highest producer of films globally, at 1776 movies across all languages per year, India suffers from a lack of cinema screen infrastructure, with its current count at 8700 cinemas (EY, 2019, 94). This means that there are only about eight film screens per million people in India. Overall, India has about 12,000 compared with China and the US count of nearly 60,000 screens (KPMG, 2018, 72).

The lack of screen infrastructure is not the only problem that affects the exhibition of multilingual film industries. It is also compounded by the unequal treatment meted out to small and medium budget films and regional films at the expense of Bollywood’s hegemony. While examining the political, economic, geographic and cultural reasons that led to the transformation from single-screen cinemas to multiplexes, Athique and Hill (2010, 203) highlight the undue preference given to big-budget Bollywood films over the regional and independent films in urban Indian multiplexes.

Media scholar Aswin Devasundaram (2016, 54), building on Athique and Hill’s (2010) findings, argued that Bollywood’s ‘influence over infrastructural and logistical pragmatics, achieved through a monopoly of the cinema multiplex space, strategic affiliations with corporate production houses and wider access to global distribution conduits’ constituted one of the many ways of exercising its hegemony as a ‘soft power.’ In such a scenario, I argue that the advent of the new screen ecology has emerged as an alternative medium for small and medium budget films that cannot afford marketing and distribution costs (Bhattacharjee, 2018). Besides the costs, the NSE has also proved beneficial for small and medium budget films, previously struggling for attention in cinemas against the big-budget Bollywood productions. 36

While television is the largest segment of Indian media industries by far, the digital media’s growth rate has been quite dramatic (Figure 2.1). Digital media has posted the highest growth compared to any other segment in 2018, with a growth rate of 41.9 percent. As per Nidhi Tewathia (2020), the internet economy contributes 6.9% to India’s GDP. In 2019, the portals grew quickly in a short time to employ 92,000 people and generate a revenue of US$2,189 million (Deloitte, 2020).

Figure 2.1 Industry-wise growth year-on-year. Source: EY (2019, 10).

One of the critical reasons for the rise in Indian internet consumption and the Indian NSE is the Indian government’s rollout of the ‘Digital India’ program in 2015. The ‘Digital India’ program was launched to set-up digital infrastructure to expand affordable internet connectivity and enable digital intervention in governance and the public sector. While exploring the implications of digital transformation in India, Narayan and Narayanan (2016, 71) noted that the program intends to offer ‘digital infrastructure as a utility to every citizen, real-time governance and services on demand, digital empowerment of citizens’ through a public-private partnership.

While analyzing the Indian government’s transparency measures in governance, Singh and Ilarvasan (2016) articulate the Digital India program initiatives such as Aadhar Card (a biometric system for identifying Indian citizens), the introduction of online and mobile government services and the launch of Government portal for engaging with citizens on issues 37

concerning education, employment and tourism as key to the development of digital growth in India. The Digital India program also proposes to connect 0.25 million Indian villages with the National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN) (Narayan and Narayanan, 2016). Through collaboration with the Indian Government, Google launched the Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA) to facilitate Hindi-language content availability.

While examining the complexities between the government, the market and the digital economy, Thomas (2019) highlights the ambiguous role of the Indian government that, at times, endorses economic liberalization through partnerships with US technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and at other times promises to safeguard the interests of citizens and local businesses. However, Thomas (2019, 71) also argues that the close relationship between the Indian government and the multi-national internet-based companies arises out of the Indian government’s plans to ‘mobilize resources, know-how, and technology in the creation of 22 smart cities by the year 2022’ as part of its ambitious Digital India project. By outlining some of these significant public-private initiatives, I exemplify the Indian government’s efforts to provide the digital infrastructure for increased digital use in everyday Indian lives.

In the next section, I detail the key developments in the Indian films and television sector post the 1990s that shaped the emergence of the Indian NSE. A brief look at the history of India’s film and broadcasting media can also help us contextualize the vital formal and informal industrial practices that shaped these sectors and eventually paved the way for the Indian NSE. I narrow the Indian film sector’s history to the Hindi film industry (Bollywood) as my thesis principally focuses on the links between Bollywood and NSE. The links between the NSE Marathi and Bengal language content with their respective film industries are explicated in chapter 6.

There is a significant body of literature (for example, Singhal and Rogers, 1988; Athique, 2012) that covers the history of Indian film and broadcast media; a thorough chronological analysis is outside the scope of this thesis. However, the focus on film and broadcast media post-1990s is primarily due to the Indian government policy shift seeking to deregulate select sectors previously in the State’s control. Athique (2012, 53), while examining the different phases of globalization of the Indian media, highlights how the move for liberalization signaled the government’s push for a ‘consumerist society with sustained rapid economic growth.’ While describing the effects of liberalization on the Indian media, Athique (2012, 53) claimed 38

that the varying levels of deregulation in the Indian media led to ‘the revival in the film industries, and broad expansion in the fields of press and radio, along with the sunrise industries of information technology and mobile telephony.’ Building on Athique (2012), I argue that liberalization played a significant role in adopting new media technologies, reduction in State monopoly and the entry of foreign investment leading to the transformation of the Indian media economy. For these reasons, I focus on the critical moments from 1991 in the film and broadcast media that led to the rise of the Indian NSE.

India’s Tryst with Film and Broadcast Media (1991-2019)

The Indian film industry was launched in 1913 through productions by Dadasaheb Phalke (Raja Harishchandra) and Dhirendra Nath Ganguly (England Returned). In their work on the history of the Indian film industry, media scholars Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980) note that the demand for Indian productions provided the foundation for establishing film industries in British-controlled Indian territories Bombay, Bengal and Madras. As of 2020, India produces the largest number of films and is home to distinct multi-lingual film industries in the form of Hindi (Mumbai), Marathi (Mumbai), Bengali (Kolkata), Kannada (Karnataka), Malayalam (Kerala), Telugu (Hyderabad), Tamil (Chennai), Punjabi (Punjab), and Gujarati (Gujarat) (Athique, 2012). Bollywood, synonymous with the Hindi film industry, is the highest contributor of domestic cinema collections, followed by Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam (Deloitte, 2020). As per Barnow and Krishnaswamy (1980, 172-173), the growth of South Indian language-specific films (Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada) was a result of the ‘rise of southern linguistic nationalism’ and resistance to the government’s promotion of Hindi as the official language.

In comparison, television in India has undergone a great transformation from its initial days of being a single, government-controlled public television channel (Doordarshan) in 1959 to multi-lingual, multi-format transnational channels that number over 800 in 2018. The changes in Indian television are shaped by a series of economic policies ranging from privatization, deregulation, and liberalization to become one of the world’s largest television industries.

Bollywood (1991-2019)

The most significant distinguishing factor between the Indian film sector from Hollywood or any other international film industry is the Indian film industry’s plurality. As discussed earlier, 39

India has multiple film industries categorized by languages that serve local and transnational audiences. Whereas Hollywood is known for its formal organizational structure characterized by few studios that control most of the film supply chain, the Indian film industry is symbolized by its lack. Simply put, individuals and companies with different businesses participate at different levels of the film life cycle. In order to avoid high entertainment taxes, box office figures were often under-estimated, leading to a complete lack of transparency in the film business.

Media scholar Manjunath Pendakur (2003, 51) aptly summarizes the informality in the industrial operations while giving a political economy account of the Indian film industries-

producers have historically resorted to raising money from private investors who come primarily from construction, jewellery and associated trades . . . they are often willing to pay usurious rates of interest (36%–40%) to an investor. Not only are there such high returns in lending money to film producers, but unaccounted money can be put to use in an industry where stars and others usually get paid in cash and receipts are only issued for a fraction of the total amount involved . . . It is not surprising then to find pirates, thieves, criminals and underworlds dons attempting their hand in the film industry.

Pendakur (2003) explains how producers often sought assistance from criminals to secure shooting dates of popular actors to exemplify the nexus between the mafia and film industries. Thus, the Indian film industries served as a fertile ground for investing ‘black money'—money obtained from illegal businesses and avoiding taxation.

Through a local and global network of informal distribution (local shops, pavement traders) and the use of technology in the form of Audio Cassettes, Compact Discs (CDs), Digital Video Disc (DVD), ‘entrepreneurs’ and mafia indulged in the sale of pirated films to the South Asian communities in the West, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Gulf (Athique, 2012). Although the concentration of black money masked the real scale and profitability of Bollywood, it gave impetus for channeling funds into the creative industries and sustaining demand for Indian cultural products across the globe.

The Bollywood (Hindi film industry), in particular, was notorious for financing 40% of the films during the 1990s through informal means (Athique, 2012). In order to curb the menace of crime and money laundering and to exploit Bollywood’s local and global economic potential, 40

the Indian government accorded it with the ‘industry status’ in 1998 (Govil, 2014). With this status, and with the liberalization policy in effect, the industry could now seek local and overseas institutional finance funding. The industry profitability improved significantly with overseas box office collections, music and broadcast rights (Athique, 2012). In many ways, the scale of the informal film economy alerted the Indian Government to Bollywood’s economic potential. As I will show later in the section on NSE, the emergence of NSE shows similar patterns of informality between platforms and portals in that the UGC led platforms link with portals by emulating content and creator mobilization strategies.

Govil (2007, 76) highlights how through the support of formal and informal distribution networks—’across legal distribution networks, non- and quasilegal, large-scale, pirate reproduction industries, and more mobile forms of tactical media exchange such as smuggled prints, dubbed videocassettes and multi-generation audiotapes’—Bollywood was able to expand its presence in countries with healthy South Asian communities like Britain, Fiji, Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa, Tanzania, Dubai, Nigeria, Malaysia, the US, Afghanistan, Egypt, Singapore and Japan.

Post the industry-status, Bollywood also witnessed a co-existence between ‘Hollywood style corporatization’ led by the entry of multi-national companies Sony, Disney, Viacom and family-run media houses Dharma Productions, Yash Raj Films, Balaji Telefilms (Punathambekar, 2013). However, despite this phenomenon, Lorenzen and Taube (2010) highlight how film businesses are driven mainly by kinship and social relations. Social structures determine the work opportunities within Bollywood. The industry’s suspicion of corporate culture arises due to its insistence on formal procedures. Lorenzen and Taube (2010) unfold these tensions in their study:

The corporate way of insisting on elaborate contracts tends to crowd out informal relations, and producers employed in the corporations are new to Bollywood and do not get many chances of building personal relations to star actors, directors and other Bollywood personalities, as they are shifted between projects and are subject to organizational changes in the corporation.

As I highlight in chapter 5, instead of enforcing corporatization, the multinational companies have conformed to the informality by either hiring industry insiders as top executives or giving 41

undue preferences to the socially elite film professionals. Thus, in such a scenario, the Indian NSE becomes an alternative space for pursuing a filmmaking career.

By highlighting the key moments that shape Bollywood’s industrial structures, I have outlined how the Indian film economy, with specific attention to Bollywood, is shaped by the messy and complex interlinking of formal and informal practices. Like Bollywood, the Indian NSE facilitates a distinct co-existence of informal content (piracy) uploaded on YouTube and Facebook and formal content (film acquisitions, original content).

I, now, proceed to the next section, where I elaborate on the development of the television industry and its role in shaping the Indian NSE. I argue that while the patterns of NSE informality are embedded within film and television industries, the NSE informality is mediated by the coexistence of outsiders (creators, intermediaries) and players (Youtube, Facebook, JioOnDemand, TVFPlay). As I argue, the entry of these players offers formalization strategies for the Indian media industry in the areas of content and creators.

Indian Television Industry (1991-2019)

India’s shift towards liberalization in 1991 indicated a departure from the state autocracy of Indian television to more entertainment-oriented, cosmopolitan, and consumerist broadcasting. Athique (2012, 69) describes the post-liberalization period of Indian television as the ‘era of polyphony,’ which was defined by:

a time for individualism, and for the expression of a list of desires that were long suppressed in the name of national integration, including desires for regional expression, consumer durables, unruly politics and audio-visual banality of a suitably ‘international’ standard.

Media scholar Purnima Mankekar (1994) notes through an ethnographic study of Indian television viewers post-liberalization that the opening up of select industries for foreign investment from 1990 was initiated to ‘modernize’ India. This was meant to be achieved by the production and consumption of consumer goods. The understanding of modernity was confined to conforming to a middle-class lifestyle exercised by salaried professionals, entrepreneurs, affluent farmers and traders, who were readily adopted by television as the ‘target audience’ owing to their high disposable income. 42

While analyzing Indian television’s post-liberalization business practices, Kohli-Khandekar (2006) argues that India’s urban middle class had already transitioned to cable TV (television) systems since the 1980s, albeit illegally, to escape the educational programming practices of Doordarshan. By connecting the televisions with cable on one end and VCR on the other, the local cable operators ran pirated local and international films and popular foreign television shows (Kohli-Khandekar, 2006, 94). These informal and unorganized practices often led to the concentration of multiple cable operators in one area—estimated to number 3500 in Mumbai— 1990, leading to skirmishes over the control of a territory. Simultaneously, the use of pirated film content also led to the constant tensions between film producers, video distributors and cable operators (Kohli-Khandekar, 2006).

The US broadcaster Cable News Network’s (CNN) telecast of the Gulf war in 1991 paved the way for the mushrooming of cable connections in India. All the cable operators had to do was invest in Dish Antenna, pick the signal, and transmit the connections through the already connected households’ wires. Around the same time, Star TV, then owned by Hong Kong- based Li Ka Shing, brought the satellite ASIASAT and began transmitting transnational news content across South Asia (Athique, 2012). By 1994, India had close to 3 million cable connections, and by 1994, the number rose to 11.8 million households. The very shady operations of the indigenous cable industry, characterized by the dense informal cable networks, contributed to television penetration in Indian households (Kohli-Khandekar, 2006, 97).

In 1991, Star TV was the first transnational satellite broadcaster to launch its service in India with five television channels (Star Plus, Prime Sports, BBC World, Star Movies, Channel V), followed by Zee TV, a general entertainment channel founded by local entrepreneur Subhash Chandra Goel in 1992 (Thomas and Kumar, 2004). This was followed by the launch of Sony Television in 1995 (Kohli-Khandekar, 2016). While comparing the television programming between different television channels, Thomas and Kumar (2004, 123) also noted that while Star TV’s content was initially broadcast across its television channels in English, Zee TV, with its repertoire of Hindi Films, variety shows, game shows and talk shows, offered innovative programming to television viewers.

Also emerging alongside multi-national companies and the Hindi networks were regional television networks led by Tamil-language television channels Sun TV and JJTV in 1993. By 1995, a slew of South Indian regional networks such as AsiaNet, Eenadu TV, Udaya TV was 43

launched to cater to South Indian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam), resulting in ‘the freeing of television from the Hindi-centric policies of state broadcasting’ (Athique, 2012, 59). While assessing the impact of privatization and globalization in Indian broadcasting, Thussu (1999) highlights that a total of 70 satellite as well as cable channels operated in India by the mid-1990s, including global broadcasters such as the BBC, Discovery, MTV, Sony, STAR and a range of local broadcasters (Thussu, 1999).

The lack of legal infrastructure to oppose international media content transmission eventually paved the path for privatizing television in India. In 1995, the monopoly of Doordarshan was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and was finally recognized as an autonomous public body in 1998. Around the same time, the Broadcasting Bill was introduced to offer private Indian broadcasters with up-linking rights from within India besides legalizing broadcasters who developed a substantial quota of Indian content and possessed 80 percent ownership of the company.

From an infrastructural viewpoint, the growth of cable networks consisting of national multi- system operators (MSOs) and local cable operators (LCOs), provided the infrastructure for commercial channels to reach Indian households. However, the sudden rise of cable TV distribution also resulted in an ‘unorganized, fragmented and unregulated market’ as there was no legal set-up to ensure accountability and transparency (Kathuria et al., 2019, 7). Subsequent interventions by the government in the cable and telecom policies, such as the Cable Television Network (Regulation) Act (1995) and the New Telecom Policy (NTP) (1999), were introduced to address the low quality, revenue leaks and transparency issues of cable TV operators (Kathuria et al., 2019). Besides focusing on the advancement of technology and the internet across the country, the NTP was also instrumental in supporting the television’s formalization drive-by categorizing a list of ‘service providers,’ which recognized cable TV operators and fixed service providers as ‘access providers.’

Following Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Star TV in the mid-1990s, the Star Plus channel launched a slew of Hindi-language programs that pitted them in direct competition with Zee TV, Sony Entertainment Television, Doordarshan and other Hindi language commercial entertainment channels. Nalin Mehta’s edited volume (2008) charts the transformation of television brought about by the advent of satellite television in its social practices, such as politics, sports and popular culture, highlighting the strategic ways by which it was ‘Indianized’ through original programming as well as the adaptation of global formats. Curtin 44

and Kumar (2002) examine pop-cultural icon Alisha Chinai’s music videos on MTV in discussing satellite television’s emergence as a site for hybridized identity formation and contested patriarchal norms.

The television industry’s digitization was marked by granting permission to transmit television signals in ‘Ku Band’ in 2001, which led to the beginning of direct-to-home services in India. In 2011, the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act was amended in a bid to mandate the transfer of analog cable services to digital addressable systems (DAS) (Ahluwalia, 2017). The government implemented this policy in four phases, the last of which ended in March 2017. The process was introduced to enforce a formal regulation system and transparency to India’s fragmented cable operations, run by approximately 700 multi-screen operators (MSOs) and 60,000 cable operators as of 2017 (Ahluwalia, 2017).

While the growth in television penetration is also a result of the government’s efforts to facilitate transparent and competitive space among distributors of television content, the television industry continues to be plagued by transparency issues in its audience measurement. In 2018, the Telecom Regulation Authority of India (TRAI) (2019) made recommendations for a reviewal of the television measurement system authority, the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), citing issues of transparency, objectivity and conflict of interest in its current structure. Based on the comments received from stakeholders on its Consultation Paper on Review of Television Audience Measurement and Ratings in India, TRAI argued that ‘no significant progress was made by BARC’ to improve its rating mechanism following its inception in July 2010 (TRAI, 2019). I detail the consequences of non-transparency on television’s production culture and the resulting migration of television creators to the new screen ecology in chapter 4.

Thus, the Indian broadcast and film sector has witnessed an uneasy co-evolution of the formal and informal economies. However, the influence of the informal media circuits in creating cultural and economic bases for the formalization of film and television industries, whether it be Bollywood’s industry status or the formalization of cable and satellite broadcasting, cannot be underestimated. I argue that these histories remind us of the significance of informal and formal practices that need to be considered when studying India’s digital transformation of the screen industries. 45

What is abundantly clear in my exploration is that the NSE dynamics are in continuity with the formal-informal television and film dynamics. My examination of NSE creator and content dynamics highlight that despite the similarity in informal-informal patterns, the formal- informal relations are shaped to a greater extent by players that lie at the periphery of Indian media industries such as professionally amateur creators on social media platforms, telecom- led portals, intermediaries, telecom portal Jio, global portal Netflix and Amazon Prime, and local portal TVFPlay, Addatimes.

I now focus on the infrastructural factors contributing to the rapid uptake of the Indian NSE amongst a growing internet-savvy userbase.

Digital Infrastructure for NSE

Just as crucial for the growth of NSE is the increased access to mobile phones and the internet. To that effect, my focus on India’s internet creator culture is timely, given that India is poised to become a US$5billion online video economy with over 650 million internet users by 2023 (BCG, 2018). As discussed in the introduction of this chapter, the Digital India program has provided a significant impetus for the pan-India proliferation of digital technology.

While internet services in India are still marred by slow speed and penetration issues, 3G (third-generation) services in 2010 gave an impetus to the web. Narayan and Narayanan’s (2016) key work chronicles India’s history with new media by tracking the landmark moments that shaped India’s technological and infrastructural growth. In historicizing the influence of the internet on India, Narayan and Narayanan (2016, 11) state:

What the internet enabled was digital media and computing, that is the new media, in a personalized fashion. Information was available at all times from all locations if one had access to the internet, via websites. Desktops mushroomed in homes and offices, cyber cafes did brisk business, the dotcom boom happened. Then came Hotmail, and Sabeer Bhatia’s story caught the imagination of the world.

The advent of the internet was also complemented by the introduction of mobile phones in 1995 (Narayan and Narayanan, 2016). As of 2019, there are 719 million internet subscribers with an internet penetration of 54 percent (KPMG, 2020). The number of internet-enabled 46

mobile phones is expected to reach 700 million by 2021 (KPMG, 2019). As discussed earlier, the exorbitant data and voice charges offered with bulky handsets have undergone tremendous changes in the pricing policies of internet service providers (ISPs) and the design, manufacturing and cost of mobile phones. The set-up of TRAI in 1997 and the subsequent New Telecom Policy in 1999 paved the way for an increase in mobile subscribers (Jeffrey and Doron, 2013, 69). By 2017, India had overtaken the United States to be the second-largest smartphone market after China (Russell, 2017).

The number of internet users in India has expanded to around 637 million in 2018 from 389 million in 2016 (KPMG, 2019). India is experiencing a proliferation of internet-enabled mobile phones. It has already crossed 300 million and is expected to reach 700 million by 2021. 4G connections are predicted to grow at 38 percent of CAGR. About 80 percent of the connections are expected to be 3G or 4G by 2021, a massive 55 percent increase from 25 percent in 2016 (KPMG, 2017).

As discussed in chapter 1, telecom operator Reliance Jio’s internet pricing has led to an overall reduction in telecom subscribers’ internet prices. India offers the cheapest data price in the world, at just US$0.25 per Gigabyte (KPMG, 2019, 22). Reliance Jio’s launch and low-cost internet data pricing in September 2016 led competitors like Vodafone and Airtel to reduce their respective rates. Indian conglomerate Reliance’s entry into the telecom sector through Reliance Jio has been instrumental in expanding internet access across the country (Mukherjee, 2019). Besides investing 42 billion dollars in digital infrastructure, Jio scaled India’s overall internet consumption by providing low-cost 4G internet rates and Jio smartphones.

Mukherjee (2019) shows how the availability of affordable internet-enabled multimedia devices, reduction in data charges, increase in data penetration, and the ever-growing video consumption on the internet has presented favorable opportunities for India’s digital economy. The government has expedited the process of 5G under the National Digital Communication Policy launched by TRAI (‘TRAI chief sees new govt,’ 2019). Further, the Indian Government’s Digital India initiatives that were discussed earlier have given impetus to digital infrastructure development.

These developments indicate India’s readiness, with the technological infrastructure needed to address growing high bandwidth digital consumption and impacting content creators’ ecology emerging from the NSE. As an example of growing online video consumption, a study by 47

global digital delivery platform Limelight Networks Inc., titled The State of Online Video 2018, concluded that Indian viewers spent more time watching mobile content, clocking eight hours and 28 minutes per week as opposed to the global mobile-viewing average of six hours and 45 minutes per week (Limelight Networks Inc., 2019). Figure 2.2 shows that online consumption in India is gaining prominence, irrespective of socio-economic backgrounds and age, and further points to some decrease in the urban-rural digital divide.

Figure 2.2 Socio-economic data on Indian online viewing. Metric: 1 lakh = 100,000.

KPMG report (2018, 17) notes a difference in the viewing pattern between television and online media. The report shows that stand-up comedy clips (32%) and ‘user-generated content’ 48

(26%) dominate online video consumption; television viewing habits are dominated by the genres of news (56%) and Hindi-feature films (38%). This consumption pattern indicates a stark difference in the motivation of audiences behind medium preferences for viewership while also signaling a cue of distinction between content on television and the internet.

It is estimated that there are 400 million Indian OTT subscribers with a weekly OTT video viewing of 3 hours and 34 minutes (KPMG, 2020). These numbers indicate a growing uptake of the NSE as a means for providing entertainment. With a focus on the various players that constitute the Indian NSE, my thesis examines the industrial practices that create favorable conditions for content consumption over the internet.

However, before gaining a macro view of the various platforms and portals within the Indian NSE, it is pertinent to shed light on the challenges that obstruct India’s embrace of the digital. Just as the increase in internet penetration and consumption facilitates the NSE’s growth, I argue that the varying levels of digital divide inhibit the Indian NSE’s economic and social potential.

Digital Divide

Unfortunately, the large-scale initiatives of the Indian government and private companies for the rapid uptake of digital technologies are unable to solve the problem of unequal digital access amongst its netizens. It is down to the fact that access to digital technology is determined by the existing social inequalities in caste, class, gender, age, education, occupation, English-level proficiency, and geography (the rural-urban divide).

Tewathia et al. (2020) provide useful evidence to support the linkage between social inequalities and the digital divide. Based on a nationwide survey on the demographics and socio-economic statistics of 27,579 rural and 14,573 households and personal interviews with the highest household earner, Tewathia et al. (2020) concluded that education, caste, and occupation play a critical role in determining the use and ownership of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The study reminds us how the digitization of economic sectors and the proliferation of technologies can deepen the digital exclusion of marginalized Indians. 49

The digital divide is characterized by inequalities in information diffusion and a lack of access to knowledge capital, creating ruptures ‘between the rich and poor, rural and urban, computer literates’ (Vermireddy, 2011). Another example that exemplifies this divide is the Indian Planning commission’s poverty report, which highlights that states with low levels of poverty (Goa, Delhi, Maharashtra, Haryana and Tamil Nadu) have high ICT index in comparison to states with high levels of poverty (Jharkhand, Bihar, Assam, Nagaland and Meghalaya) (Tewathia, 2020). Moreover, as a consequence of the prevalent gender inequality in India, scholar Pradip Mohanty’s (2020, 277) study on digital connectivity in India shows that females’ access to ICTs is ‘much lesser’ than men’s. As per Mohanty (2020, 270), age also plays a significant role in measuring ICT access meaning ‘higher the age, lesser the access.’

India has a fundamental language divide, with about 60–80 percent of the websites in English (Keniston and Kumar, 2003) but only a meager 2–10 percent of India’s population speaking clear English. Compare this with 2018 figures, where only 52.9 percent of the top 10 million websites used the English language (McCarthy, 2018). According to the 2011 Census (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2018), about 129,260,000 Indians listed English as a first, second or third language. The lack of English proficiency and the absence of a website interface in Indian languages has kept several Indians away from the digital domain.

However, as general levels of the digital divide rise, those outside the rise feel it even more. An ensuing digital divide also means that the government’s digital welfare policies are not well received by its citizens. Srivastava and Roy (2016, 28) argue that the digital divide also restricts participation in community discourse:

It can also influence people’s access to essential information and services such as usage of online services provided by the government and other commercial organizations such as registration of deaths/births and online banking. Since new media’s interactivity and ability to facilitate participation is unmatched by other traditional media, lack of access to new media not only creates a gap in terms of participation between those with access and those without access, it exaggerates the gap by providing those with access a stronger relative advantage over those without access.

The digital divide is also compounded by the rural-urban divide that permeates within the uneven Indian digital landscape. While examining the relations between ICT, socio- 50

economic development and digital divides, Maiti et al. (2020) highlight India’s urban teledensity ( an indicator of telecom penetration) measured by the number of telephones per 100 population at 154.18% in 2016 in comparison to 51% rural teledensity. TRAI’s quarterly (June–September 2018) performance indicated a total base of 194.07 million rural internet subscribers against 365.94 million in the urban area (TRAI, 2019). Moreover, while every second household in the metro cities had access to the internet, every tenth of underdeveloped rural households had access to the internet (Maiti et al., 2020). Even in places where the internet connection is available, its usage has been affected by low internet speed. According to KPMG (2020), India globally ranks amongst the countries with the slowest mobile internet connections (129) with an average of 12.16 MBPS (MegaBytes Per Second). However, it is pertinent to note that there has been a general improvement in India’s gender- and region-based digital divide, with its global ranking of 47 on the Internet Inclusion Index (KPMG, 2019).

In summary, India’s realization of the economic potential of the digital marketplace is highly dependent on its ability to mitigate the digital divide. The NSE is only a part of the broader internet economy that the government is trying to capitalize on through its ‘Digital India’ program. However, to taste the real success of these initiatives, it is incumbent for the government to look beyond the internet as an economic and technological opportunity; Especially since the full realization of the Indian NSE is increasingly tied to the bridging of the digital divide.

In urging for a CMIS multi-scalar framework that goes beyond the amateur-professional, UGC-PGC, platform-portal divide, I highlight the industrial, social and cultural changes that have shaped the digital transformation of the Indian screen industries. Having established the key historical and infrastructural factors that have facilitated the emergence of NSE, I build on global and local digital transformations to argue how the story of India’s NSE cannot be told without accommodating platform and portal intervention.

Indian NSE within the Global and Local Digital Context

In this section, I will offer an overview of the various players that constitute the Indian NSE. and briefly introduce the 13 platforms and portals (see chapter 1) selected for the thesis. In situating my study within the broader corpus of global literature (Jenkins, 2006; 51

Bruns, 2008; Burgess, 2006, 2007; Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Cunningham and Silver, 2013; Holt and Sanson, 2013; Lobato and Meese, 2013; Lotz, 2017, 2018) I argue how the existence of the content and creator-based linkages between portals and social media dominant creators distinguishes the Indian NSE from the formal-informal UGC- PGC divide that permeates in the US (see Cunningham and Craig, 2019).

Henry Jenkins’ (2006) seminal study on convergence culture highlights how the participatory framework of Web 2.0 offered new meanings to the creative practices in media industries. The advent of social media platforms highlights an increasing union of forces that combines the sharing and spreading of content to different communities (Jenkins, Ford and Green, 2013). Jenkins, Ford and Green (2013) define the phenomenon as ‘spreadability,’ wherein media corporations no longer control the creation, distribution and redistribution of content. My study builds on these works to highlight how the open access to the creation and circulation of content on YouTube and Facebook has enabled the consumers to put on the role of ‘producers’ (producers and distributors) (Bruns, 2008, 13–14) and contribute in the shaping of formal- informal media circuits of production culture.

Media scholar Jean Burgess (2006, 2007) emphasizes how modern communication enables the storytellers to be original and intimate in their quotidian practices defined as ‘vernacular creators.’ Building on these studies, I use the Indian NSE as an example to show how digital transformations have shifted power structures in traditional media by allowing new voices, often amateur in origin, to produce professional-quality works on social media platforms.

Cunningham and Silver (2013, 1) chronicle the changes brought about by ‘new online distribution giants that are starting to operate as TV-like networks.’ Cunningham and Silver (2013) discuss the various implications for business strategies and organizational structures due to content delivery over the internet. As I show in this section, India’s digital economy is witnessing a similar change whereby businesses from the telecom, e-commerce and media management sectors are venturing into the NSE to cater to the emerging Indian digital media consumption and creation practices.

Similarly, Holt and Sanson (2013) discuss streaming media’s integration with established the US screen industries and the subsequent impact on the media industry landscape and audiences. Holt and Sanson (2013) define this phenomenon as ‘connected viewing,’ where the media companies employ multiplatform strategies and entrepreneurs with their start-ups are 52

vying for attention from the audiences by employing innovative business models. As I show below, Indian NSE projects varying degrees of this phenomenon by facilitating players from diverse categories (social media platform, global portal, language-specific native portal, telecom portal, digital ‘pure-play’ native portals).

The participatory framework, together with a significantly longer history in India of online platforms like YouTube and Facebook, has been the primary driver for India’s online content production. The growth in YouTube and Facebook has been complemented by the rapid increase of platforms and portals since 2010. In 2017, to counter YouTube’s virtual monopoly over streaming video services, Facebook launched a creator tool to entice the creators to create community and monetize them through brand integrations (‘Facebook launches Creator app,’ 2017). This was followed by the launch of Facebook Watch in late August 2018, a curated platform in partnership with creators, close on the heels of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement to spend US$1 billion on original content.

Since Facebook’s launch globally in 2006, it has enjoyed India’s most extensive user base, with 270 million as of 2018 compared to YouTube’s userbase of 225 million (Mitter, 2018). For its part, YouTube has already commissioned a series of originals web-series and films under its SVOD service YouTube Red besides identifying, mobilizing and engaging emerging content creators on its platform through creator camps hosting fan-fests and facilitating their audio-visual production needs.

Such measures by social media platforms suggest a tendency to blur the boundaries that distinguish platforms from portals. As we observed in this chapter, India’s informal economy has proven to be hugely influential in exploiting the screen industries’ economic, social and cultural potential. Thus, if the history of Indian media teaches us anything, it is giving attention to the grassroots levels of creativity and innovation that lie outside the formal media economies.

For these reasons, I expand on Fitzgerald's (2019) list to articulate the 40 platforms and portals operating in India as of early 2019, as listed in Table 2.1. The list is sourced from Deloitte (2020), MICA (2019) and Fitzgerald (2019). The selection is based on their launch date as of mid-2019.

Table 2.1 List of platforms/portals operating in Indian new screen ecology 53

Platform/portal Owner Year YouTube (platform) Google 2006 Facebook (platform) Facebook 2008 ErosNOW Eros International Pvt Ltd 2012 company SonyLIV Sony Pictures Network India 2013 Hotstar Star India Pvt Ltd 2015 YuppTV YuppTV 2015 SUNNXT Sun TV Network Ltd 2017 TVFPlay The Viral Fever 2012 on YouTube. 2015 as a VoD platform Netflix Netflix 2016 Voot Viacom18 Media Private Ltd 2016 Viu Vuclip 2016 Jio On Demand Reliance Infocomm 2016 Amazon Prime Amazon 2016 ALTBalaji Balaji Telefilms 2017 HOOQ Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2017 Warner Media and Singtel Hoichoi Shree Venkatesh Films 2017 Zee5 Zee Entertainment Enterprises 2017 Ltd MXPlayer Times Internet (Times Group) 2019 Ullu Ullu Digital Pvt. Ltd, a subsidiary 2018 of the Jaypeeco Infotainment Shemaroome Shemaroo Entertainment 2019 HungamaPlay Hungama Digital media 2015 entertainment Flipkart Flipkart 2019 Doordarshan Doordarshan 2019 TikTok (Platform) Bytedance 2017 Firework (Platform) Firework 2019 54

ShareChat (Platform) Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd 2015 Airtel Xstream Airtel 2019 Apple TV Apple 2019 BigFlix Reliance Entertainment 2008 CuriosityStream CuriosityStream 2019 DocuBay IN10 Media 2019 Veqta Multimedia Group 2012 Flizmovies Flizmovies 2019 Mubi Mubi 2019 Muvizz Muvizz 2019 Mavshack.com Mavshack 2014 ShareIT Technologies ShareIT 2019 Google Play Movies and TV Google 2012 TubiTV Adrise 2014 Zomato Original Zomato 2019

Sources: Fitzgerald (2019); MICA (2019); Deloitte (2020).

As highlighted in chapter 1, I have selected 13 selected platforms and portals (YouTube, Facebook, Zee5, Hoichoi, Addatimes, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Voot, Hotstar, Reliance Jio, ALTBalaji, TVFPlay, Spuul) (see chapter 1) as objects for this study. They are classified into six following categories: traditional broadcasters, digital ‘pure-play’ native portals, social media platforms, global portals, and telecom-led portals and regional language-specific portals.

Players such as Sony, Hotstar, Voot and Zee are typically categorized as traditional broadcasters-led portals due to their presence in the television industry. TVFPlay and ALTBalaji’s qualities as indigenous and digital-only content portals allow for their identification as digital ‘pure-play’ native portals. YouTube and Facebook are identified as social media platforms due to their social interface and free uploading of content characteristics that separate them from the rest. JioOnDemand’s distinct position as a telecom company led portal reflects its categorization as a telecom and content venture. The specificity of the Bengali language lends Hoichoi and Addatimes as different regional language-specific portals. Finally, the global online distribution networks of Amazon Prime, Netflix and Spuul qualify their distinction as global portals. In the next chapter, I will focus on these players to examine 55

their creator and content-based interdependencies and revenue operations to highlight their contribution in developing a nuanced creator culture.

Four revenue models dominate the Indian NSE and pretty much most parts of the world. The first model is referred to as Advertising video-on-demand (AVoD). It is characterized by singular dependence on advertisements as a source of revenue. YouTube and Facebook are clear examples of NSE players that operate under this model. As can be observed from YouTube and Facebook’s massive online video consumption and Hotstar and Voot’s launch strategies, such a system works very well in India, where consumers are shy of paying for content and often resort to piracy. The second model, referred to as Subscription Video-on- Demand (SVoD), is characterized by charging a fee in exchange for its streaming services. Zee5, Hoichoi, Netflix employ this model. The third system involves using a combination of AVoD and SVoD models and is commonly defined as the Freemium or hybrid model. The Freemium model is employed by keeping marquee content behind a paywall and offering the rest under the AVoD model. Both Hotstar and Voot have pivoted to a Hybrid revenue strategy. Finally, the Transaction Video on Demand (TVoD) model can be witnessed on Google Play Movies, and TV charges a fixed fee for every video content purchase.

In dwelling on the formal-informal relations that shape the NSE, my work extends on the special section of the Media Industries journal (2019) that analyzes India’s platform economy: its developments against historical configurations, markets, characteristics and geographies of the Indian audio-visual landscape. Athique’s (2019) article, in particular, highlights the increase in investment and the rising competition between the local and multi-national companies Amazon, Reliance Jio and Netflix to evidence the economic potential of the online audio-visual landscape. In what follows, I discuss the distinct value propositions of the six categories of platforms and portals.

The first category is occupied by the early movers, YouTube and Facebook. Since YouTube’s launch in 2005, it has primarily served as the site for user-generated content. Cunningham and Craig’s (2019) seminal study how YouTube serves as a distinct platform for commercializing and professionalizing online content creators who lie at the intersection of the PGC world of film (Hollywood) and portal (Netflix). As I highlight in chapter 3, Facebook’s evolution from a community-oriented social media platform to integrating content and advertising offered an alternative pathway for Youtube creators and provided additional affordances (Fanpage, instant messaging, advertising) for creators to monetize their content. My work builds on their findings 56

to argue how YouTube and Facebook’s monetization and creator mobilization strategies bridge the UGC-PGC world. By unconsciously functioning as a getaway for ‘outsiders,’ these platforms have facilitated creator and creator-led content innovation to link the film and portals.

While juxtaposing YouTube’s formalization of UGC content with the Bhojpuri-language media market’s informality, Kumar (2019) argues how the commercialization of recorded Bhojpuri live shows on YouTube offers a new way for formalizing the informal media transactions. I show the linkages between the formal and informal media economies to suggest that the story of digital transformation cannot be told without considering the NSE informalities to professionalize amateur content through social media platforms and intermediary transformation.

In the second category, the introduction of broadcaster-led portals seems like an obvious strategy by Sony, Star, Viacom18 and Zee to capture and monetize the growing online audience by taking advantage of their content library. As Bouquillion (2020, 134) argues, such a move also signals the need to ‘retain their broadcast audience and advertisers.’ These portals are also using the OTT distribution as a substitute for cable and satellite transmission to cater to their transnational audience. Players like Zee have discontinued their cable broadcasting services in Europe, Australia Fiji, while Star has pulled the plug on Canada and the US to offer content via its portal, albeit with a differential pricing than India (Bouquillion, 2020, 146).

The third category belongs to global portals like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Spuul. Spuul (2012) was the earliest portal to be launched within this category. Founded by entrepreneurs Subin Subaiah, S Mohan, and ex-founder of Sony television in India, Sudesh Iyer, Spuul operates primarily through syndicated content offerings from film and television. Focusing on securing the Indian diaspora based out of Australia, Canada, and the Middle East, Spuul offers films, television shows, short films and web series in multiple languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Malayalam, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Tamil.

In contrast, late entrants like Netflix (2016) and Amazon Prime (2016) offer a distinct opportunity to capitalize on India’s growing digital consumption, low internet charges, the world’s largest smartphone userbase, and rapidly expanding digital infrastructure (Bhushan, 2019). However, due to significant differences in their business operations, Amazon Prime and Netflix offer diverse value propositions to the Indian NSE. 57

In comparing India’s platform economy with the historical evolution of buying and selling goods and services in India, Athique (2019) identifies the contemporary platform logistics as the aggregator for channeling India’s rooted informal and social economies. Such an observation is crucial to underline Amazon’s distinct way of integrating consumers by offering audio-video streaming and e-e-commerce services. Media scholar Ishita Tiwary (2020) uses the framework ‘eco-sphere’ to articulate the integrated nature of Amazon’s services. Tiwary (2020, 88) underscores Amazon’s strategy ‘to enter the audio-visual space, not as a television provider per se, but as a seller of video products densely inter-linked to multi-sided markets in retail, advertising, music, data and finance.’ I build on Tiwary’s (2020) scholarship to highlight how Amazon Prime’s collaboration with Indian creators and intermediaries offer another layer of distinctiveness to the NSE.

Lobato’s (2019) book on Netflix parses out the portal’s industrial practices in catering to 190 countries in the world. Lobato’s section on India highlights how after the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan, India assumes the fourth place amongst Netflix’s country-based number of original commissions. Between 2019 and 2020, Netflix proposed spending $420 million in commissioning original and acquiring licensed Indian content as a part of its strategy to add 100 million Indian subscribers (Steigrad, 2019). Lobato (2019) addresses debates regarding the flow of content across multiple geographies and suggests newer ways of studying portals that emphasize scrutinizing their region-based catalog. I build on Lobato’s (2019) work to articulate in chapter 3 how India’s distinct cultural heterogeneities, production cultures and competition with local platforms and portals pose significant localization challenges in content and operations. Besides the price-sensitive nature of Indian audiences highlighted earlier in this chapter, the multi-lingual plurality and the diversity of Indian NSE means that the global portal need to rely on the successes of media practitioners that exist within (film and TV) and at the periphery (social media) of the Indian media landscape to lure Indian audiences.

Indian telecom operator Reliance Jio occupies the fourth category. Reliance Jio shows traits similar to Tiwary’s (2020) conceptualization of ‘eco-sphere’ with investments across multiple markets such as telecom, media, retail, e-commerce, petroleum (Bouquillion). As discussed earlier in chapter 1, Reliance Jio’s inclusion in the thesis is solely due to its original content investment. Besides, it is also the only telecom provider to own a portal and stakes in other portals such as Voot (owned by Viacom18, a subsidiary of Reliance), AltBalaji (24.9% stake), Eros. As per Bouquillon (2020, 143), Reliance’s investments indicate ‘an attempt to seal the 58 industrial alliances by financial partnerships but also as an Indianization of OTT capitalism vis- à-vis foreign interests.’ Nevertheless, the enmeshing of content backed by syndications with established players and original content with telecommunication offers a critical advantage to Reliance Jio over other players.

The fifth category consists of indigenous homegrown portals like TVFPlay and AltBalaji. AltBalaji is owned by family-run media company Balaji Telefilms which is known for producing and distributing television and film content. TVFPlay is a small and unusual player in the portal mix, given that it operates on social media through its content verticals and functions as a producer by creating web series for platforms such as SonyLIV, Amazon Prime and Netflix. Started by entrepreneur Arunabh Kumar as a result of television broadcasters’ reluctance to air parody and spoofs, Kumar founded TVF on Youtube in 2011 with investments from venture capitalists.

As per media scholar Akshaya Kumar’s (2020) content analysis of TVF’s flagship channel on YouTube, TVF’s early creations focussed on ridiculing television’s cathartic programming and targeting a niche demographic of urban youth. However, Kumar (2020) argues that the growing pressure of expanding its audience demographics and advertorial expectations led TVF to accommodate the very cathartic melodramatic tone into its rebellious narratives that it once mocked television for. While Kumar’s (2020) work reflects a growing similarity between television and NSE content, I contend that conforming to advertisements and catharsis is not enough to signify the sameness between two mediums that are separated by differences in industrial practices (content creation, casting, shooting, editing). I reflect on this nuance in chapter 4, where I also highlight how a direct comparison between television and NSE’s fiction genre can, perhaps, offer a better chance of seeing significant distinctions in narratives.

The final category of players Hoichoi and Addatimes are distinguished by their wilful adoption of the Bengali language for running their portals. While Hoichoi is owned by popular Bengali language television and film producer and distributor Shree Venkatesh Films, Addatimes is owned by ex-television producer Rajiv Mehra. With Bengali as the sixth most spoken language, Bengali speaking population is found in Bangladesh, Myanmar, the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, to name a few. As we saw in this chapter, there is a huge demand for Indian content from overseas. The transnational demand for regional content is big enough for players like Hoichoi and Addatimes to focus their energy on a single language. As we will see in 59 chapter 5, the foray of portals into languages other than Hindi and English and regional creators’ success contribute to the Indian NSE’s distinctiveness.

Thus, rather than offer direct comparisons and offer competitor analysis, I argue that the diverse NSE ecology offers an exciting opportunity to exhibit their talent globally through innovative storytelling and production practices that do not conform to the conventional aesthetic styles and content themes of films and television industry (‘India a bigger market,’ 2018). These aspirations are further complemented by the Indian creators’ desire to woo non- diasporic audiences without worrying about the marketing and distribution expenses that an international release might entail.

Kay (2018) discusses the dynamic ways in which platforms and portals have offered new opportunities to create complex political, social and culturally relevant local commentaries that were neglected within television’s programming practices. In addressing the gap in the academic literature in South Asian studies, which have tended to focus mainly on traditional media, Kay attends to internet comedy as a site for understanding ‘millennial India.’ Through close readings of media texts of emerging online creators, comments analysis on those videos and an understanding of their reception through interviews with select millennial Indians, Kay (2018) examines how these creations contest and reinvent the complex discourses of nation, identity, feminism and representation. My thesis builds on Kay (2018) to highlight the formal, informal, social relations and working conditions of creators on platforms and portals and the broader implications for the Indian media industry that arise from these dynamics.

While there are apparent differences that separate the platforms from portals, the pooling of platforms and portals for this thesis is down to the role that platforms have played in introducing new players and newer forms of content into the Indian media industry landscape. The mobilization of creators that lie outside the social structures of film and television industries expands content and creators’ diversity. In particular, chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate how creator movements between platforms, portals, Bollywood, Tollywood (Bengali cinema), Marathi cinema challenge the very informality that mediates television and films’ industrial practices while also bringing challenges of algorithmic culture into the mix.

In the next chapter, I analyze the industrial cultures of platforms and portals operating in India in greater depth. I provide a detailed account of the diversity of their business models and 60 content strategies and examine the platform–portal–creator–intermediary interdependencies arising out of the industrial practices of 13 select platforms and portals.

Chapter 3 Mapping the Key Platforms and Portals

What role does the Indian NSE play in shaping the contours of the screen industries in India? This chapter builds on the formal-informal media linkages to highlight the industrial and cultural dynamics of platforms/portals in contributing to the distinctiveness of the Indian NSE. In mapping their business practices, I lay the ground for the thesis’ fundamental argument, highlighting the interdependencies between creators, intermediaries, platforms and portals. In doing so, this thesis addresses Research Question 1 concerning platforms/portals' influence in facilitating creator-careers.

As we saw in chapter 2, despite the inherent challenges of the digital divide, uneven purchasing power, and infrastructural deficits, India is estimated to become the second-largest video- consuming country by 2020 (Fitzgerald, 2019). The ironies in this narrative demand an on- ground inquiry as diverse local and multinational companies continue to enter the Indian NSE to exploit its economic potential (Athique, 2019). In laying the ground for studying India’s online creator culture, I begin my mapping exercise by diving deeper into the characteristics of 11 portals (Hotstar, Spuul, Hoichoi, Addatimes, TVFPlay, Reliance Jio, Zee5, Voot, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and ALTBalaji) and two platforms (YouTube and Facebook).

While a study of the Indian digital audience and its characteristics is not central to this thesis, it is essential to note that the advent of platforms and portals, combined with the decrease in the cost of mobile phones and internet usage, has also transformed India’s viewing habits (see chapter 2). I attribute this causal relation to the price-sensitive nature of the Indian audience, which can now afford the cost of the internet and the mobile phones to consume online content. At the same time, television continues to be the most viewed medium, owing to the extremely low cost for acquiring cable or Direct-to-Home (DTH) connection in India (Sharma, 2020). For as little as US$5 a month (Sharma, 2020),1 an Indian television-owning household is likely to secure access to more than 260 television channels (including all television channels from legacy networks, sports and kids’ channels).

Compare this to Netflix, which not only charges approximately US$10 a month for a maximum of four users, but also does not provide live streaming of sports or news content. Add this to the

1 US$1 = INR 74.47 as of 27 March 2020. 62

internet’s subsequent cost to consume Netflix, thereby raising the overall entertainment consumption cost. Comparing the utility of linear television based on the affordability of price and audio-visual choices could triumph over any portal service. These reasons inform India’s portal challenges in contrast to the single-screen viewing (family-viewing), price and choice- sensitive traits of Indian TV consumers. Having said that, YouTube and Facebook’s AVoD and UGC structure have emerged as substitutes for online audience who may not have time for linear viewing and are hesitant to foot monthly portal subscription fees.

Simultaneously, whereas previously Indian television consumption was largely community- driven, the increase in availability and access to mobile and laptop content has led viewers (especially young audiences between 18 and 34 – see KPMG, 2019) to exercise their discretion for watching content. Much like the desire of new age creators to access a global audience for their content (see Ganti, 2012), the exposure to global content has led young viewers to demand sophistication and quality in their local content, leading to a gradual increase in viewing platforms and portals.

Both platforms and portals are governed by the recommendation engines of platforms and portals where content is often showcased based on viewer choice, a practice identified by media scholars Hallinan and Striphas (2016) as ‘algorithmic culture.’ As per Pasquale (2015), the rise of ‘algorithmic culture’ means that neither the viewers nor the creators are entirely aware of how the data is processed, leading to the phenomenon of ‘black box.’ The effects of ‘algorithmic culture’ are experienced differently on platforms and portals due to the difference in their affordances.

At a macro-level, both platforms and portals offer accurate metrics on viewership. The algorithms that power the NSE back-end capture user details, real-time video viewing habits and offer content solutions from its catalog to the viewer based on these data. However, from a creator perspective, platforms and portals differ in that platforms offer greater transparency on viewership data than the portals (Cunningham and Craig, 2019, 45). This is understandable as creators depend on YouTube and Facebook data for direct (paid directly by the platform or through programmatic advertising) or indirect (sponsorship through views) forms of monetization. In contrast, portals bear no liability for sharing their content catalog’s viewership metrics as the compensation is independent of the content’s performance on the portal. 63

Alongside these distinctions, the ability to pursue distinct revenue models (AVoD, TVoD, SVoD, Freemium) also enables the 40 platform-portals to operate within India’s diverse NSE. In return, these revenue models determine the relationship between screen time (the time spent viewing content on screen), data and monetization strategies. For instance, the AVoD model adopters pay greater attention to screen time as the consumer viewership is used as a commodity to sell advertisers. In contrast, an SVoD model indicates the portal’s dependence on subscriptions as a source of revenue. Therefore, much of the attention is paid on using data to understand consumer viewing behaviour and identify suitable content strategies for retaining and expanding the consumer base. Whereas the Freemium model combines AVoD and SVoD strategies to take advantage of advertising and subscriptions, the TVoD model gathers consumer viewing habits based on sale of every video content to a verified user account.

Moreover, the cultural politics and geopolitics of catering to a country that accommodates 121 languages provide both challenges and opportunities to the platforms/portals that, unlike television, do not have to confine themselves to a particular language or category (such as general entertainment, news or sports). As we saw in chapter 2 in the section on television industry, the transnational appeal of multilingual content help portals to service countries other than India. At the same time, the preference of the portals to create Hindi language content—a language spoken widely in North India and promoted religiously as an official language by Indian government as a part of the nation building project (see Athique, 2012)—places emerging NSE regional creators in a precarious position (see chapter 6). Nevertheless, as I show in this chapter, the advent of language-specific portals like Hoichoi and Addatimes continue to offer newer forms of resistance and opportunities for regional creators.

As we will see in this chapter, the capital and resources that these media services invest are heavily dependent on the combination of the size and scale of the company and their measuring of India’s revenue potential compared with their economic pursuits. Further to the introduction in chapter 2, where I offered a summary of the 13 selected platforms and portals—broadcaster- led portals (Hotstar, Voot); digital ‘pure-play’ native portals (ALTBalaji, TVFPlay); regional language-specific native portals (Hoichoi, Addatimes); global portals (Spuul, Netflix, Amazon), social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook); and telecom-led portal (Reliance Jio) —the origins of these companies offer the key to their distinctiveness. 64

Telecom-led Portal

Reliance Jio

As highlighted in chapter 1, Reliance Jio Infocom’s $42 billion investment in digital infrastructure, followed by its entry into the platform economy, has redefined the operating definition of telecom service providers. While analyzing the enmeshment of infrastructure and platform-related discourses, Mukherjee (2019, 1) argues that ‘Jio made infrastructural investments (in the spectrum, cell towers, and fiber optics networks) to promote its suite of apps (JioTV, JioChat, and JioMoney).’

Rishi et al. (2018, 7) demonstrate how Reliance Jio schemes such as ‘offering free sim cards with unlimited free high-speed 4G data, voice/video calls, instant messaging and numerous free applications that covered a range of services from news to entertainment to education’ for a period of 90 days, which was subsequently extended to March 2017, enabled the company to amass a 50 million-strong subscriber base in just 83 days, a feat that existing telecom companies such as Airtel and Vodafone had taken 12 and 13 years respectively to achieve (‘Reliance Jio crosses 50 million,’ 2016).

Soon after its launch, Reliance Jio introduced the Jio portal, JioOnDemand, which featured a host of diverse content offerings such as movies, television and short clips. JioOnDemand is part of a cluster of applications launched by the telecom service provider, which include JioBeats (music), JioPlay (live television) as well as a messaging service and cloud storage. The JioOnDemand content library does not boast any original content. It largely licenses content from its subsidiary, Network18, which it acquired in 2014 for US$619 million to signal its intent of venturing into the media and broadcast industry. By completing the takeover of Network18, the Reliance company also became the majority shareholder of Viacom18, a previous joint venture between Paramount Pictures Pvt Ltd and Network18, thus strengthening its presence in the television, films and digital offerings of Viacom18.

To strengthen its market position, Jio also acquired a 24.9 per cent stake in popular television and digital production company Balaji Telefilms (Sn, 2017). Incidentally, Balaji Telefilms also owns ALTBalaji, a recently launched subscription-based portal. ALTBalaji is discussed in greater detail later in the chapter. Additionally, it also signed a two-year deal with ex-Disney India CEO Siddharth Roy Kapur’s maiden production company, Roy Kapur Films, to create 65

original content (Afaqs, 2017). The content will be put up under the banner of ‘Jio Originals’ and feature diverse short and long-form narratives exclusively for Jio Subscribers (Afaqs, 2017). With this collaboration, it will be able to enjoy access to both television and digital content, and contribute to a disruptive and unique relationship between the entertainment and telecom sectors. Reliance Jio’s marriage of telecom and content space helps the company to drive its telecom take-up rather than content, akin to Parthasarthi and Athique’s (2019, 432) reading of the mediated meta-market exchanges in the Indian media economy:

This mutual connectivity with the wider economic system implies transfers of both value and capital that are not commonly encapsulated within the established accounting of media production.

While explaining the company’s business strategy, Vaibhav Kumar (2018), Business Head (Product and Business Strategy) of Reliance Jio (JioCinema and JioTV) remarked:

We wanted to be a part of this system (content production) to ensure that they have secured ourselves in terms of content inflow. We believe that it always makes sense to make a movie worth US$ 4.3 million (rounded off) than buy the rights of a movie for the same amount.

The telecom industry already enjoys the advantage of huge subscriber base owing to its voice and internet services. The telecom operators have the edge over the pure-play digital companies, as they have successfully intruded into the mobiles of everyday consumers. They can build on these advantages by offering content to strengthen their value-added services. Reliance Jio Infocomm has disrupted the telecom landscape with its content and network offering.

In India’s case, it is a distinct proposition that provides entertainment (through direct investment in online content creation), data and network services under one billing system. Reliance Jio’s investment in the NSE has prompted popular telecom services to shore up their offerings in this space. Kumar (2018), who also looks after the virtual reality initiatives at Jio, shared the distinct internet-related facets of the Indian creator ecology:

Today the content creators are not looking for money; they are looking for visibility. This is because, despite the fact that YouTube has grown to such a large 66

extent in terms of views and money, creators are still not able to reach a point where they see that they have grown. So, from a platform like Jio cinema, all they are expecting is the reach to their audience. This will help them in getting bigger work. The priority is not money but viewership.

To strengthen its content offerings, Jio has also partnered with Hindi film industry director Vikram Bhatt, who has produced web series such as Maya and Twisted on his YouTube channel VB on the Web (Bhatt, 2017). Jio has reached an exclusive deal with Vikram Bhatt to release the second season of both shows on its portal owing to their popularity on YouTube. Among the many Jio service applications that it offers exclusively to Jio subscribers, the prominent ones are JioTV, a catch-up destination of syndicated and aggregated television shows with episodes that have featured within the last seven days, and JioCinema, where subscribers can watch beyond the seven-day history of television shows, together with movies, music videos, sketches and short films. Further, reports claim that the freemium model might be implemented on these applications (Dua, 2018).

Social Media Platforms

YouTube

In this section, I focus on YouTube and highlight the various initiatives of the platform to strengthen its presence in India through commissioning and facilitation of content. Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has largely been responsible for spurring the growth of UGC content with its ability to facilitate uploading, sharing and monetization of content across most regions of the globe (Burgess, 2006; Burgess and Green, 2018). Based on the 2018 data, YouTube leads the mobile consumption for the time spent on video streaming services in India (MICA, 2019). Mark Lefkowitz, Head of YouTube Creator and Artist Development of the APAC region, while highlighting the growth of Indian creators on YouTube, noted Indians’ increased consumption of content over the internet. He pointed out, ‘There are 450 million Internet users in India, which is an incredible number. As many as 390 million are active Internet users, and we see the continued amount of growth here’ (‘India has been on radar for everyone,’ 2018). He also noted that 60 percent of YouTube’s India watch-time came from beyond its six largest cities. 67

In order to mobilize creators and assist them with the production of content, YouTube has created 10 YouTube Spaces globally, one of which is in Mumbai. Based on a 2015 partnership with Whistling Woods International, an arts, media and communication institute, it has workshop training and offers its studio and camera equipment to creators who have a minimum of 1000 subscribers. YouTube also initiated two ‘YouTube Pop-up’ spaces, dedicated three-day events in Hyderabad in 2017 and Delhi in 2018 (‘First ever YouTube Pop-up Space Delhi,’ 2018), where creators were given a chance to create content using YouTube’s production equipment and further attend workshops and meet fellow creators for networking and collaboration.

In tandem with its global initiative of nurturing creators who have subscribers within the range of 10,000–100,000 through its NextUP program, YouTube hosted a program in Delhi in 2018 where it selected 12 Indian YouTube channels for a week-long creator program, and awarded an equipment voucher worth US$2000 and mentoring from production experts (‘Introducing the Class of 2018 for YouTube,’ 2018). In chapter 5, I articulate how the Indian YouTube FanFest has grown over the years in both size and scale. Recalling the initiative, Jigisha Mistry (2018), Head of YouTube Space in Mumbai, stated:

The first fan fest started off four years ago. It was like a small community get- together between creators and fans that was aired in a small open-air theatre in Bandra, Mumbai. Over time the number of creators has grown all over India. Currently, we have over 330 channels that have crossed the million subscribers mark, and it is not just in Hindi and English but in other regional languages too.

The FanFest, in its fifth year in India, was held in the cities of Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai to connect the fans with creators through live performances and meet- and-greet sessions. India has three online content creators, who have crossed the 10 million subscriber base threshold, Bhuvan Bam, Technical Guruji and Amit Bhadana. An average of two creators reaches a one-million subscriber base every week and 2500 creators cross the milestone of their first 1000 subscribers every day (‘3 Indian content creators cross 10M subscriber mark,’ 2018).

In order to compete with portals, YouTube introduced a freemium model and created a line-up of YouTube Originals in India in 2018 that was available only to YouTube premium users. It commissioned the only Indian show, Arrived, an Indian singing reality talent show that was 68

produced in partnership with MCN Qyuki (Jalan, 2018) (see chapter 7). However, the subsequent failure of its freemium model in 2019 led YouTube to allow all YouTube users to access original shows to (Spangler, 2018). Mohan and Punathambekar’s (2018) inquiry into India’s online content-creation practices identifies YouTube as the site for the creator’s localization practices. I build on Mohan and Punathambekar’s (2018) findings in chapter 5, where I articulate the contribution of regional online content creators in paving the way for localization for portals and platforms.

Facebook

In order to counter YouTube’s dominance over video content, Facebook launched the ‘Watch’ video tab on its platform globally in August 2018 (Carey-Simos, 2018). What began as a strictly controlled space for running video advertisements by allowing selected publishers and celebrities changed within a month as more pages were allowed to run video advertisements for over three-minute content with data showing access to over 23,000 pages as of 16 December 2018 (Maheshwari, 2018). Further, in order to position itself as a hybrid version of platform and portal, it launched six original series (Kim, 2018), out of which four originals were recommissioned for the second season (Shah, 2018). With a repertoire of content across news, entertainment and sports categories, the platform invited a monthly viewership of 400 million with 75 million daily viewers watching over one-minute content. Facebook has also introduced new features such as ‘Facebook Watch Party,’ which allows members of the same group to watch videos and engage with each other, an initiative aimed at increasing the interactivity among its users (‘Facebook Watch now available on desktop,’ 2018).

Like YouTube, Facebook held creator camps across selected cities in India in order to mobilise and raise awareness of its localization practices in India. Creator Priyam Ghose (2018), who creates sketches and comedy videos through his Facebook page,2 described the important events of the creator meet in Kolkata to which he was invited:

At the camp, Facebook emphasized on the importance of having a page for content creators as they have added many features. Analytics like Publishing Tool where you can create, delete, expire, re-upload your post with a new date.

2 https://www.facebook.com/PriyamGhoseComedy. 69

Analytics help you keep an eye on your top videos, overall page reach and your fan base - be it the gender, age bracket, country and the city they are from.

Ghose also shared the same data that Facebook shared with its creators about their page (Figures 3.1 and 3.2).

Figure 3.1 Ghose’s Facebook Creator page summary. Ghose (2018)

Figure 3.2 Ghose’s Facebook Creator page insight on videos. Ghose (2018)

Evidently, Facebook has ramped up its monetization practices in India to attract local creators to its platform. By introducing ad breaks in Hindi, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil and English (‘Facebook makes ad breaks available for video creators in India,’ 2018), Facebook signalled 70 its intention to facilitate the promotion of regional and local advertisers through the ad breaks on its platform. Further, it has only allowed Indian creators with more than 10,000 followers to monetize, in addition to requiring them to gather 30,000 one-minute eyeballs on their content inside 60 days to be entitled to a monetization plan (Ganguly, 2018). Besides these announcements, made on Facebook’s Creator Day in Mumbai, it also rolled out its new feature titled, ‘Brand Collabs Manager,’ which would allow brands to identify and team up with creators for collaboration (Cohen, 2018).

Broadcaster-owned Portals

Hotstar

As of 2018, Hotstar recorded the second-highest monthly active usage after YouTube in terms of time spent (MICA, 2019). Hotstar is part of Rupert Murdoch’s behemoth media corporation, 21st Century Fox. The fact that 21st Century Fox also owns Star India Network, a collection of over 60 Indian broadcasting channels across multiple Indian languages such as Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Hindi and diverse genres such as general entertainment channels, news and sports gives it an advantage of a strong library of content and a ready-made audience, as opposed to global media streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon. Launched in 2015, Hotstar offers its services through a ‘freemium model’ – a combination of free and premium services that are priced at Rs 999 (approximately US $16.14) per year.

While Hotstar’s catalogue largely hosts the television content of its network channels, it has recently diversified its database by aggregating popular shows and movies from across the world. In order to cater to the global interests of the Indian viewers, Hotstar acquired the streaming rights for the seventh season of the popular television show Game of Thrones (Narayanan, 2019), adding to its catalogue of licensed English content from HBO, Showtime, Fox and Disney besides a curated list of Sony Pictures and Warner Bros films (Arora, 2018).

Also setting Hotstar apart from its competitors in India is its aggressive investment in the sports genre. Hotstar’s content strategy is reflected in its creation of marquee sports properties such as its indigenous intellectual sports property Pro-Kabaddi League, acquisition of broadcast rights for the much-celebrated Indian Cricket Premier League, exclusive digital coverage of the English Football Premier League and Indian Football League, as well as live streaming of a total of 14 local and international sporting activities that include golf, badminton, hockey, 71 athletics and horse racing.3 Hotstar’s investment in sports (live) genre is a stark contrast to most portals, even at the global level, given that most Western SVoDs (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video) have stayed away from the acquisition of sports telecast rights.

Additionally, Hotstar – which operates under the company name of Novi Digital, a subsidiary of Star – raised US$73.8 million in order to compete against the other streaming platforms operating in India (‘Hotstar raises Rs 516cr,’ 2018). Given that the audio-visual consumption habits and cord-cutting phenomenon of the United States are primarily indicative of audiences’ preference to watch content on the internet (Lotz, 2018), the portal has decided to stop the transmission of its Indian network channels over cable in the United States and instead stream it on Hotstar (Thaly, 2018). In 2017, Hotstar launched Cineplay, a new form of storytelling that reproduces popular theatre plays on a mobile screen (Vijayasarthy, 2017). However, the library for original shows is still in its nascent stage. Speaking about this in an interview, Hotstar CEO Ajit Mohan said:

We don’t believe in web series. I think the whole language of web series or ‘originals’ came from streaming platforms that did not have access to high-quality content. So, they said, ‘Let’s create something cheap and quick. We don’t have much content to show so let’s create some hoo-haa with web series and originals.’ As we have seen in last two years, a web series does nothing for consumers, for storytelling or for the platforms. When you have a portfolio which includes live sports, movies and international and local shows, you don’t need to resort to quick and dirty answers to solve your content problem. (Roy Chowdhury, 2017)

Even so, Hotstar did venture into web series to commission the first Tamil web series, As I am Suffering from Kadhal (Narayanan 2017) in India as a further foray into regional language content creation, adding to its catalogue of regional language films and soap operas. According to an industry report on platforms in India by MICA Institute, Hotstar offered 50,000 hours of content on its platform with ‘96% of watch time from the videos that are longer than 20 minutes’ (MICA, 2018, 44). The report also highlighted the platform's regional focus by stating that its catalog hosted more Malayalam language films than those in the popular Hindi language (MICA, 2018, 44).

3 https://www.hotstar.com/sports. 72

Thus, Hotstar offers a distinct dynamic as compared with portals, which are investing heavily on the production of web series with their diversified value propositions. As of November 2018, Hotstar emerged as a clear leader with 700,000 paid subscriptions according to Duff and Phelp’s report (Singh, 2018). Moreover, Walt Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s media assets for a reported US$71.3 billion gives direct access of 700 million new Indian Hotstar viewers to Walt Disney, signalling its entry into the Indian NSE (Iyengar, 2018).

Voot

Like Hotstar, Voot has the advantage of operating under the umbrella of a broadcaster. The fact that Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd owns Voot gives the AVoD platform ready-made content from the network’s broadcaster channels such as MTV, Colors, Nickelodeon, Vh1, Colors Bangla and Colors Kannada, highlighting its eclectic mix of television broadcast content portfolio across genres and languages. The Viacom18 network was founded in 2007 and to date owns 44 television channels broadcast in 80 countries. It is currently owned through a joint venture between TV18 Broadcast (51 percent stake), owned by Reliance Jio Infocomm founder Mukesh Ambani and foreign conglomerate Viacom18. As well as its broadcasting business, the company has invested in digital (Voot), live events (Supersonic music festival), films (Viacom18 Motion Pictures) and merchandise (consumer products).

Gandhi (2018), the Chief Operating Officer of Voot, offered a nuanced understanding of Indian online audiences, as opposed to the television audience that was adopted to inform Voot’s strategy, as distinct from Viacom18’s television channels:

Segmentation of the audience should be done based on what life stage your audience is in instead of their age, and the streaming platforms tend to target people who have just got their first job and beyond and not just the college students. For instance, whenever I ask anyone about their affinity for online web series like Permanent Roommates (TVF) and Pitchers (TVF), people are quick to remark that it is something that they can relate to. When I looked at their perspective more deeply, I concluded that streaming platform originals are the story of our life, but television soap operas are exaggerated stories of others’ lives. In the future, though, the streaming platforms will put pressure on television to make it's content better as a more significant number of people will realize that 73

this is not the type of content they want to watch, and eventually, after a point of time, the lines between the streaming platforms and television will blur.

Gandhi’s (2018) comments mark a similar understanding to my cohort of creators who distinguish between television and NSE content (discussed in chapter 4). Perhaps more interesting is that when discussing portal-made content, Gandhi chooses to distance it from television content and instead compare it with social media content (the TVF Pitchers web series was pitched on social media). Gandhi’s interpretation is symptomatic of the creator’s perception of audiences on each medium. The industrial logic of business that depends on online-generated content – whether on platforms or portals – is structured to offer a personalized entertainment form.

Both Voot and Hotstar offer direct access to their broadcast television channel subsidiaries. They thus have a diverse and robust library of television shows to function as a destination for ‘catch-up’ content and ‘content around content,’ an analogy used to define the creation of exclusive online content around television shows. Further, Voot also benefits from its Motion Pictures division of Viacom18 Motion Pictures – similar to Fox Star Studio’s affiliation with Hotstar – to add to its catalog of films. As of 2018, Voot holds the fifth spot in terms of the time spent on platforms and portals (MICA, 2019).

In an interview, the CEO of Viacom18, Sudhanshu Vats, revealed the network’s plan to introduce a freemium business model by putting selective content under subscription: ‘As we go forward, we are looking to launch a dedicated product for Voot Kids that will sit behind a paywall’ (Ravindran, 2018). In the same interview, Vats disclosed Voot’s global ambition by declaring the details of Voot’s imminent launch in the United Kingdom through a strategic partnership with telecom company Virgin Media. This further highlights the ambitions of the Indian portals to cater to a transnational audience, although one might argue that Indian television content is already distributed to many countries by television broadcasters (Kumar, 2010; Sinclair and Harrison, 2004, 44–5).

In August 2018, Voot announced a line-up of 18 original web series, some of which would be produced under the banner of Viacom18 Motion Pictures’ Tipping Point Films. These shows were to be produced across multiple languages such as Tamil, Hindi and diverse genres and subjects like drama, crime, history, thriller, biopic, sports and comedy (‘Voot to launch 18 originals,’ 2018). Monika Shergill, Executive Vice President and Content Head of Voot, 74 highlighted in an interview that the portal’s commissioning strategy was informed by the data obtained from audience profiling and the content team’s ‘instincts’ (Narayanan, 2018).

Among its various original content creations in 2017, Voot also partnered with BBC Productions to launch the country’s first digital survival show, Stupid Man Smart Phone. The show centres on the life of a digital celebrity, Sumeet Vyas, who embarks on adventures in rugged terrain with only the support of a smartphone and his social media followers. It also commissioned a second season of It’s Not that Simple, a web show starring popular Hindi film actress Swara Bhaskar and actors Sumeet Vyaas and Purab Kohli, which addresses the issue of gender bias (It’s Not That Simple, 2018). The repeated casting of Sumeet Vyas, who attained ‘celebrity status’ on YouTube following his role in TVF’s debut web series Permanent Roommates (2014), highlights the creator interdependency between early movers like YouTube and Voot. Given the fact that YouTube was the first destination for limited episodic fiction drama series, commissioning original ‘native-to-internet’ web series in similar formats also indicates interdependencies within content strategy.

Zee5

Alongside fellow legacy Indian broadcasters Star and Viacom18, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (ZEEL) introduced its streaming media service, Zee5, in February 2018. Interestingly, Zee is a late entrant because it was the first Hindi language satellite television in India. However, one might also argue that Zee had initially launched two streaming platforms: DittoTV in 2012 (EA, 2012) and OZEE in February 2016 (Pai, 2016). While DittoTV served as a destination for other live television channels streamed globally through its electronic programmatic guide, OZEE focused exclusively on streaming ZEE’s broadcast network content from a diverse range of genres and languages.4 With its overwhelming repertoire of more than 20 television channels, ZEE is one of the biggest television networks in Asia.5

In February 2018, ZEE decided to subsume OZEE and ZEE5 services to incorporate and relaunch its streaming platform as ZEE5 (Ahluwalia, 2018), which in addition to hosting its television network content, and its acquired and licensed film library and original shows, would also produce short films across multiple Indian languages, such as Marathi, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati. In order to pursue its global video streaming aspirations and gain a

4 https://www.zeeentertainment.com. 5 https://www.thematv.com/channels/zee-network. 75

stronger foothold from its current scope of streaming ZEE5 in 190 countries, it has planned strategic disinvestment of 50 per cent in ZEE5 (Jha, 2019). While its business models vary in accordance with the country in which it operates, in India it follows a subscription model, offering varied options for payment and subscription length (Figure 3.3). It ranks tenth in terms of its monthly active consumption compared with other streaming media services (MICA, 2019).

Figure 3.3 Zee5 subscription plan, 2018.

Source:https://www.zee5.com/myaccount/subscription.

Maintaining its focus on tapping the diversity of the Indian audience, Zee5 has managed to create original web shows in multiple genres and diverse languages such as Marathi (Liftman, Date With Saie, Sex, Drugs and Theatre), Bengali (Sharate Aaj, Alarm, Kaali) (‘ZEE5’s Tejkaran Singh Bajaj, ALTBalaji’s Nimisha Pandey quit,’ 2018), Telugu (B.Tech, Nanna Koochi, Chitra Vichitram) (‘Zee5 launches its third Telugu original,’ 2018) and Tamil (Kallachirruppu, America Mappillai, Alarm). Highlighting their regional focus and their distinct value proposition from the competition, MD and CEO of ZEE5 Punit Goenka stated in an interview: 76

The content capability of our company is not replicable in any way. Today, if you look at any media tech company operating in India, you’ll notice that they operate in a very niche market segment. They, at best, look at 1–2 per cent of this country because their content spread is restricted to 90:10 – i.e., 90 per cent international and 10 per cent domestic, whereas, in India, the consumption pattern of Indian consumers is their own preferred language content. Our own ZEE5 platform has 55 per cent + (plus) content in regional languages, not just Hindi, within a short span of 6–7 months of its launch. The attractiveness of ZEE is going to be the inherent capability to create local content. (‘We can create content for the world,’ 2018).

In tandem with its localization policy, Zee5 also announced a slate of nine original Tamil web shows and films, and also introduced a special subscription package for Tamil, Telugu and Kannada language-speaking audience at INR 49/ month (US$0.68) (Baddhan, 2018).

Zee5 Creative Producer Abhijit Deb explained that the platform is more likely to collaborate with film and online content creators as opposed to television, highlighting the creative hierarchy of creative labor of each of the medium’s practitioners. Deb (2018) clarified this:

Right now, we are basically open to partnering at a script level with anybody who has a good script. We are actually trying to avoid television producers because they come with a different sensibility, but yeah, we are happy to work with web producers, film producers and advertisers.

Like most portals and platforms, Deb’s interpretation offers a negative perception about television producers, hinting yet again at the differing sensibilities between television and online. Despite being one of the biggest general entertainment channels (GECs), Zee5’s strategy of avoiding television producers offers a robust assessment of the categorisation that legacy media companies make as they develop content strategies for television and portal.

‘Pure play’ Local Portals

TVFPlay

A somewhat disruptive player in the mix is TVF (The Viral Fever), which has been purely conceived out of the success of its social media channels on YouTube, Facebook and 77

Instagram. TVF is the first entity to create the first-ever web series in India through YouTube (Permanent Roommates, 2014). Since its debut on YouTube in 2012, TVF has transitioned from creating content on social media to launching a dedicated portal as well as a specialist online creator, collaborating with competitors such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and SonyLIV by creating web series on their portals. App Annie, the data-mining company, ranked TVFPlay in the top five portals in the first half of June 2016 (Velayanikal, 2016).

However, it is hard to map TVF’s viewership engagement, given that its audience consumes content through its YouTube channels as well as the portal. To date, TVFPlay is the only portal to have originated from the social media platforms. Even so, as I will show in chapter 5, there is a continuous exchange of media personnel from platforms to portals. Yet, despite the existence of its portal, TVF has continued to create short-form content on its social media properties. The TVF network comprises four YouTube channels – The Screen Patti, The Timeliners, Girliyapa and Funda Curry – which have a dedicated team that creates content and collaborates with other YouTubers. This is mainly due to their availability to promote and engage better with their extensive online fan base, while also use that data traffic to negotiate better with brands for placement opportunities.

Furthermore, this strategy also helps them to become self-reliant and reduce their dependence on social media platforms whose algorithms and monetization strategies have been known to affect the anxieties of the creators (Bishop, 2018). The social capital derived from success on social media is used to develop web shows with other portals, such as Amazon Prime Video (Kota Factory, Hostel Daze), SonyLIV (Gullak), Netflix (Yeh Meri Family) and the recently launched Mx Player (Immature). The quality of TVF’s creation is evidenced by the fact that its production for MxPlayer (Immature) was India’s first-ever and only nominated web series in CanneSeries at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival (MICA, 2019).

Explaining the rationale behind TVFPlay, its Associate Creative Director Nidhi Bisht (2018) said:

YouTube was a mall, and my channels were one of the shops in the mall. The mall naturally has more shops [owned] by other people. So, to have exclusivity, we made a showroom in the form of a streaming platform (portal) where all the content that we make is available, and all the people who exclusively want to follow them can find them at a place called TVFPlay. We also wanted to curate and share something with the audience something like a playlist which is going to 78

stay till the rest of their lives, and for that very reason, it was essential to have a streaming platform.

While the platform may not have excess capital to invest in the acquisition of global content or the legacy networks’ vast content library, it has relied on its creativity, authenticity and loyal fan base to attract partnerships and audience. In 2017, TVFPlay roped in Indian online content creators popular on YouTube, such as Ashish Chanchlani6 and Bhuvan Bam (BB ki Vines) (Bam, 2016) to collaborate in creating content.7 In fact, TVF and Bhuvan Bam came together to create web series on their platform titled Bachelors.8 One of its earlier web shows, TVF Pitchers, is also ranked at 92 in the IMDB top 250 global television shows of all time (Walia & Sharma, 2015).

In November 2018, TVF also collaborated with ShareChat, India’s homegrown social networking platform, to launch the all-India online talent discovery show, The Viral Stars, aimed at identifying the next generation of online talent. The competition required participators to send 30-second videos on ShareChat platform in any of the eight languages, such as Marathi, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi, Kannada and Telugu across genres, featuring on ShareChat as well as presented as a 200-episode series on TVFPlay.

I discuss TVF’s creator culture and industrial practices in detail in chapter 5 by outlining their social media entertainment properties, the rationale behind each property and their everyday content-creation practices. In doing so, I also show how such a level of success is not limited to TVF alone as, since the introduction of YouTube and Facebook in India, several companies – such as Dice Media, Arré, ScoopWhoop and Culture Machine – have coexisted on platforms and portals.

ALTBalaji

ALTBalaji debuted in April 2017 (Jha and Gupta, 2017). It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Balaji Telefilms Pvt Ltd, a popular television production company owned by Ekta Kapoor, who has previously produced successful television shows for Indian broadcasters like Star and

6 https://www.youtube.com/user/ashchanchlani (Ashish Chanchlani’s YouTube channel). 7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyfhxlaeihg (TVF and Ashish Chanchalani’s collaboration). 8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x3ZoyvQJiQ (TVF and Bhuvan Bam’s collaboration). 79

Viacom18. Following its launch, Reliance Industries Limited – which also owns telecom company Reliance Jio – bought a 25 percent stake in Balaji Telefilms Pvt Ltd (Choudhary, 2017). This deal allowed Balaji Telefilms to further channel these funds to create content for ALTBalaji in exchange for exclusive access to the platform’s content for Jio telecom subscribers. Kapoor also produces Hindi films under the banner of Balaji Motion Pictures and is a familiar name in India’s media and entertainment industry. The platform currently hosts 2.3 million active users and hopes to achieve break-even through its SVOD revenue model by 2022 (‘AltBalaji eyes Rs 150 cr revenue,’ 2018).

While discussing ALTBalaji’s genesis, Ekta Kapoor disclosed in an interview that, ‘There’s a big world between Narcos (Netflix show) and Naagin (highly rated television show on Colors Viacom18 channel), and we hope to capture that’ (‘Ekta Kapoor on ALTBalaji,’ 2017). What Kapoor really means is that there is a need to cater to an audience that does not watch Netflix or foreign content and also does not relate to the general entertainment shows on television. ALTBalaji would be a platform whose content could cater to the wide audience that exists at the intersection of television and global language content. The platform offers 32 original web shows with a strong focus on Hindi language content – although, within the content slate, one may find a solitary web-show in other languages such as Marathi, Tamil, Bengali and Gujarati (Jha and Gupta, 2017).

Explaining the importance of language in catering to a transnational audience, ALTBalaji Chief Operating Officer Sunil Nair (2018) said:

In India, you will find content in Hindi-English combination which caters to the metro audience, but we have 22 official languages as per the Indian Constitution. If you look at languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Punjabi, Awadhi or Bhojpuri, these put together are sizeable masses.

Regional languages thus play a significant role in catering to transnational as well as Indian overseas audiences. Furthermore, a cursory glance at its content slate also reveals how ALTBalaji has interestingly roped in popular faces from television for its many shows, such as Poulomi Das (Suthar, 2018), Sakshi Tanwar, Ram Kapoor (Karrle Tu Bhi Mohabbat, 2017). This is also because of Balaji Telefilms’ closer association with television stars – although the portal’s ability to permeate crossover of television celebrities is unique considering the overall general porosity between film and online creator labor (see chapter 4). 80

Like many portals, ALTBalaji has attracted Hindi film actors such as Nimrat Kaur, Rajkumar Rao and Arunoday Singh to its web shows, such as Test-Tube, Bose- Dead or Alive and Apaharan (Kidnapped) respectively. As well as web shows, the platform also offers movies and children’s content. Further, it has also planned to develop around 45–50 web shows until 2020 in the build-up of its content slate (‘ALTBalaji plans to invest,’ 2018).

Local Strategies of Global Portals

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video

While Hotstar adopts a freemium model, Netflix prefers SVoD, and while Netflix boasts of successful global shows from its current library, Amazon Prime Video also bundles the benefits of running an e-commerce website by offering purchase and delivery benefits along with content. However, both Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have actively been acquiring and commissioning Indian content to attract Indian viewers. One of the most significant comparisons, though, relates to how these portals are priced and how they have changed over time.

While Netflix has retained its uniform global pricing strategy by charging approximately US$7.74 (INR 499) per month, Amazon Prime Video introduced its services in India by offering its services for the year at the same price, basically charging Indian consumers a price per month that was ten times lower. Subsequently, Amazon Prime Video has increased its subscription rates and is currently offering two options, where one can either opt to pay INR 129 (US$1.80) per month or INR 999 (US$14) per year. Interestingly, Amazon Prime Video charges the lowest subscription rates in India compared with its rates in other countries (MICA, 2019). While Amazon Prime Video holds fourth place in India for monthly average users for video streaming applications, Netflix occupies the ninth spot (MICA, 2019).

Netflix Chief Product Officer Russel Peters (cited in SN, 2018) hinted in the interview that the company might lower its pricing in the future:

We are just getting started in India. We will experiment with other pricing models and see how that does in terms of being able to accelerate our growth and get more access. But even on the existing model, we feel like we have a long runway ahead of us in India. 81

This is critical because Amazon Prime Video intends to get Indian consumers to subscribe to its portal and then subsequently introduce higher plans once they are already hooked. On the other hand, Netflix’s pricing strategy until now has only been affordable to a particular affluent sector, and therefore it remains to be seen how and when Netflix will actually reach its sweet price point in order to cater to a broader middle-class Indian population. I argue that there is a more significant strategy at play even with its pricing strategy; to see why, there is a need to understand its content library in detail.

Ramon Lobato’s book Netflix Nations (2019) explains how debates surrounding cultural and linguistic diversity, localization and platform imperialism can be addressed through analysis of its content library. Lobato highlights how most Netflix titles are dominated by the US screen industries and are mostly in English. Lobato (2019, 185) highlights how most of Netflix’s Indian library is reserved only for a smaller population of ‘English speaking, tech-savvy and urban Indian elites,’ compared with to the much broader socioeconomically diverse, multilingual, Indian NSE audience. Hence, the strategy is to attract this specific set of Indian consumers until it populates its library with more Indian language content through commissioning and licensing. Once Netflix reaches a considerable number of hours of its Indian content library, it might reduce its prices to attract a wider Indian audience.

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video’s media globalisation strategies have raised further concerns about their culturally imperialistic practices (‘Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to face local quotas,’ 2016) as their catalogs are evidently populated with American titles, suggesting less appreciation of and opportunities for growth for local producers. Media scholar Mjøs (2015, 268) raises concerns about the dominance of US-based media in his study of media imperialism practices:

The worldwide expansion of US-originated cable and television channels, the growth of multichannel universes and the emergence of streaming video-on- demand services like Netflix and HBO have all contributed to increasing the distribution of US film and television around the world.

Similar concerns have been raised in Europe, where the European Parliament passed a law in October 2018 demanding that Netflix and Amazon Prime Video maintain a content catalogue of at least 30 per cent European content – an effort aimed at promoting cultural diversity and 82

localization practices (Locklear, 2018). In comparison, these portals have had a free hand in India, primarily due to India’s unregulated Internet media policy environment.

Even so, I argue, the nature of India’s NSE makes it impossible for globalportals to dominate based just on foreign content. This is because, before Netflix and Amazon Prime Video’s arrival, the streaming market in India was already crowded with platforms and portals, each of which was producing local content, mobilizing local talent and offering competitive pricing strategies. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video were already facing competition from local and global players. These factors invariably led them to commission and license Indian content. Since its launch in 2016 in India, Netflix’s catalogue has amassed a total of 4706 Indian titles (Hutchison, 2018), putting India in the sixth position in comparison with the titles acquired, commissioned or syndicated from other countries (Bhattacharya, 2018).

This did not happen without difficulties. When Netflix came to India and initially decided to license legacy media-owned television and film content, it was rejected according to a highly placed senior media professional working in the media industry who did not wish to be named. This is understandable, since the broadcaster led portals already distribute their television content. For instance, Star TV has Hotstar, Viacom18 channels have Voot, and Sony TV had Sony LIV.

Moreover, as I will highlight in chapter 4, the distinct content-creation practices of TVF and Dice Media created a loyal online fan base, so it was only natural for Netflix to license as well as partner with these creators to further localise their content-creation strategies. This was evident in Netflix’s partnership with TVF and Dice Media to license their web series, such as Yeh Meri Family (This is My Family) (Yeh Meri Family, 2018) and Little Things Season 2 (Bhattacharya, 2018) respectively.

Thus, Netflix had to rely on collaborations with emerging YouTube creators in order to build its audience base in India. In acknowledging the challenges of a global streaming media service in catering to the culturally, socially and economically heterogeneous Indian audience, Lobato (2019, 125) highlights that:

There is no single language that is understood by all citizens across this vast nation. Proficiency in English, the default language of business, advertising and elite communication, is limited to around a third of the population. What’s more, 83

Bollywood is an unassailable force: it is by far the most popular form of moving- image entertainment, with Hollywood coming a distant second. India has its own thriving star system, its own storytelling traditions, its own dream factory. There is not an obvious need for foreign content, even though the market is certainly big enough to support a range of styles.

Besides online creators and in alignment with its global strategy of collaboration with established film personnel, Netflix also struck partnerships with established Hindi film producers to produce, acquire and commission web series and films such as Sacred Games (Season 1 and 2), Selection Day, Love per Square Feet and Brahman Naman (Bow to Brahmin). Netflix has also forged a strategic alliance with Hindi film superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s production company Red Chillies Entertainment to announce the production of a multilingual web series based on the novel, Bard of Blood (Yu and Cherian, 2017).

In chapter 7, I highlight how Netflix teamed up with talent agency Tulsea to identify creative talent for its web series Sacred Games. With Sacred Games, Netflix was able to bring together a popular and talented ensemble of Hindi film writers, directors and actors such as Varun Grover, Vikramaditya Motwane, Anurag Kashyap, Radhika Apte, Saif Ali Khan and Nawaazudin Siddiqui to create a buzz. The show has been received equally well by the Indian internet audience, with popular dialogues and characters from the web series being circulated on social media platforms as memes, leading Netflix to commission a second season. Netflix pledged a US$13 billion global content budget to create about 700 original web series and films for 2018 (Nembhard, 2018).

I thus argue that for any portal to succeed in India, they have no choice but to localise their practices, regardless of media regulatory policies. The nature of India’s NSE is distinctly placed to support localization for increasingly informed and discerning Indian viewers. Further, explaining the rationale behind the pricing strategy, Netflix Marketing Manager Sidharth Ravindran (2018) said:

If one goes and watches a film with two tickets and popcorn in a multiplex, it comes around 1000 INR [US$13.82]. Also, it is about showing the kind of stories that one has. The other platforms position themselves with some other unique proposition – for instance, Amazon offers Inside Edge [web show], but at the base level of it, there is also a 24-hour delivery. Similarly, if one looks at Netflix, there 84

is a broader audience for each show, and there is a unique value proposition of what the larger global audience is seeing.

In justifying the pricing strategy, Ravindran (2018) also demonstrates the inherent conspicuous consumption traits of Indian audiences, who have likely subscribed to Netflix as an ostentatious way of displaying their social and economic capital, akin to Veblen’s (1899, 85) theorizing of leisure practices of the elite:

From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes of reputability lies in the element of waste that is common to both. In the one case it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it is a waste of goods.

Thus, while Netflix has a lot of ground to cover owing to the huge competition it faces, it has certainly made its presence felt by forging crucial partnerships with the Hindi film industry and the platform incumbents.

Closely following Netflix’s trails in terms of audience viewership is Amazon Prime Video, Jeff Bezos’s venture that has uniquely aligned Prime services with its e-commerce platform Amazon, promising lucrative deals and delivery options to its Prime subscribers (Tiwary, 2020). Amazon Prime Video has developed a successful collaboration with online content creators to produce their live shows as well as allowing them to create web series through a strategic partnership with talent agents OML. I will discuss OML’s role in detail in chapter 7, where I articulate the intervention of intermediaries.

On the other hand, by roping in media practitioners from Hindi and regional film industries in original web series such as Inside Edge and Breathe, and recently released gangster dramas Mirzapur, Vella Raja (Tamil) and Gangstars (Telugu), it has also been able to leverage their fan following while appealing to a wider audience already known for its multilingual diversity. Amazon Prime Video’s catalogue in India offers films that are available across six spoken languages: English, Marathi, Bengali, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Further, in its bid to increase the convenience of navigation for native Indian users, it has also introduced a Hindi language interface along with forthcoming application developments in Tamil and Telugu language interfaces, which highlights the importance it places on the South Indian diaspora (Pagnamenta, 2018). 85

Amazon Prime Video Marketing Manager Nabh Gupta (2018) said these strategies were developed by keeping in mind the multicultural diversity of Indian audience. Gupta looks after the customer engagement division within the marketing team working on product development to improve its awareness and navigation for new and existing users. Gupta (2018) pointed out that:

Within every 10 kilometers in the Indian market, the culture and language changes. So, you want to cover all the customers, and secondly, it is purely around the scale. It is only once you make content available in the language and in preference which will cut across the urban cities or the quintessential the top 10 towns that you will be able to penetrate within the local areas and get them to use technology.

Gupta’s understanding highlights an interesting way of looking at Indian audiences: it does not segregate between Indian language content and further challenges the definition of ‘regional language’ to argue the heterogeneity exists within Indian regions. I elaborate on the localization practices and cultural politics of platforms as well as creators in chapter 6.

Spuul

While India is seeing a rise in streaming platforms that are increasingly localizing their content strategies by venturing into original production, Spuul, an SVoD platform with its headquarters in Singapore, functions purely through the acquisition and licensing of Indian television and film shows by brokering strategic partnerships with production houses and studios. It is a global streaming service that caters to the Indian diaspora around the world, as well as those who are familiar with Indian content.

With over 47 million globally registered subscribers, Spuul’s majority audience comes from the South and South-East Asian regions, North America, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, hinting at the two major audience sectors on which it is betting: the global Indian diaspora and the acclimatised audience of Indian television shows and films – especially Hindi films. A recent Boston Consulting Group report also revealed that Hindi films are the most preferred Indian content for the global audience (Pratap, 2018). 86

As Spuul’s Head of Content Girish Dwibhashyam (2018) elaborated, the company’s strategy was informed largely by the internal data and its target audience:

When Spuul as a platform is acquiring or commissioning any content, language plays a role in taking a call whether content should be acquired or not. Depending on the audience that they are targeting, the language of the content is decided. For example, if they want to target Canada and Australia, then the preferred language of the content will be Punjabi as a vast majority of Punjabi Indians live in that area. Furthermore, if they want to target the Middle East, then the preferred language will be Malayalam as the majority of people living there are from Kerala. Also, another reason why language is considered is that regional language content costs lesser than the content that is available in mass languages English and Hindi.

The portal’s library hosts 10,000 hours of Indian content, which includes television shows and films from eight popular Indian languages: Hindi, Punjabi, Malayalam, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Bengali and Tamil. However, Spuul is also keen to expand ‘its customer base by delivering global content to local consumers and local content to the global diaspora,’9 and offering content in ‘non-English languages like Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Thai, Bahasa and Spanish’ (Dwibhashyam, 2018). Spuul has also initiated the use of blockchain technology to launch ‘Spokkz,’ an initial coin offering (ICO) through which it intends to develop a decentralised economy, whereby platform users will be rewarded for engaging via comments, reviews, shares and advertisement viewing; they will also be offered a chance to fund content projects of their choice (‘Bollywood streaming service Spuul launches,’ 2018).

Language-specific portals

Hoichoi

The language in which the online streaming content is produced is also related to the investor’s perception of consumer preferences. While the majority of the streaming platforms produce in Hindi, English or a mixture of the two, investors have also produced original vernacular content, as shown by Hotstar’s investment in the Tamil language web series.

9 https://spuul.com/about. 87

However, it is one thing to have content diversification as a part of the portal strategy, and quite another to conceive a portal that focuses solely on a specific language. For instance, while in Kolkata, I came across portals such as Hoichoi and Addatimes, the only streaming platforms to create content in the Bengali language. To offer a commercial perspective of the significance of this language, Bengali or Bangla is the seventh most spoken language in the world and the second most spoken after Hindi in India. It also serves as the official language of Bangladesh.

Launched in 2017, Hoichoi is owned by established media and entertainment company SVF Entertainment Pvt Ltd, which has produced television shows and over 100 films in Bengali, making it one of the biggest production houses of Tollywood (Bengali cinema). It also owns four television channels: Sangeet Bangla, Music India, Music UK and Sangeet Bhojpuri. SVF Entertainment Pvt Ltd is engaged in multiple media businesses, such as production, distribution, exhibition, online video and online audio. It has also been popularly dubbed the Yashraj Films (a popular Bollywood Production and Distribution company in Mumbai) of the East (Roy, 2014).

With its subscription-based model, Hoichoi offers three subscription plans of INR 399 per year (US$5.68), INR 249 (US$3.54) per six months and INR149 (US$2.12) per three months in India (‘Hoichoi in expansion mode,’ 2018). However, it has slightly altered its pricing structure to introduce a transactional based video on demand (TVoD) model in order to offer the digital premiere of its theatrically released films (Mitter, 2018). Furthermore, it is also prevalent in other countries with Bengali speaking audiences, such as Middle East countries, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, with a country-specific pricing structure.

Due to its domination across the Bengali-language television and film industry, Hoichoi has emerged as one of the marquee destinations for Bengali entertainment, providing films and original shows under its platform and appearing within the top 10 grossing entertainment applications on iOS with over 240 million minutes of the library (‘Hoichoi among top 10 grossing entertainment apps,’ 2018). It offers a collection of over 500 Bengali language films and 1000 Bengali songs apart from original web series (Indiablooms, 2017). However, Hoichoi is also planning to dub its titles in other languages such as Tamil, Arabic, Telugu and Hindi to diversify its audience (‘Hoichoi announces 100 hours of original content,’ 2018). In order to cater to a global Bengali-speaking audience of 250 million, it has announced 30 original web shows, 12 original films and the acquisition of 200 Bengali films for its second year (Mitter, 2018). 88

Owing to its familiarity and success in Tollywood, Hoichoi has utilised Tollywood talents such as director Moinak Bhaumik and actress Priyanka Sarkar among many others to produce its original web series and films. Moreover, in order to attract a Bangladesh online audience, it has teamed up with award-winning director Amitabh Reza Chaudhuri to produce the first Bengali web series, Dhaka Metro (‘Hoichoi announces 100 hours of original content,’ 2018). Vishnu Mohta (2018), the co-founder of Hoichoi, underlines the importance of catering to a niche Bengali-speaking audience:

Language is a very intricate part of our life. It is the most generic thing about human beings. Sometimes language is taken for granted, but often, it is one of the biggest barriers between people. Still, it is one of the most underappreciated commodities. Hoichoi has only done business in one language, and it has turned out to be beneficial for them. It takes a lifetime to understand a particular community.

Mohta not only evokes the significance of language in forming identity, but also emphasizes its role in forming a transnational community, as is evident in the case of Bangladesh and Kolkata.

Addatimes

Rajiv Mehra, the founder of Addatimes, is a veteran in the Bengali television industry, with over 17 years of experience as a television producer. He pointed out his frustration with the television rating system and the attitude of Bengali-language television broadcasters as the prime reason for launching this Bengali language-specific portal (Mehra, 2018). Addatimes’ operations are run by a young team of creative writers, graphic designers, editors and production managers, with the average age being 23–24 years.

Like Hoichoi, Addatimes offers an SVoD model offering multiple options for a subscription- like INR 499 (US$8) for three months and INR 1599 (US$25) for a year.10 Speaking about his experiments in content genres, Mehra (2018) remarked:

‘Bengalis’ are keen on watching emotional content. The youth are more inclined towards reality shows. They also like music-based content. This was revealed in the data that we collected where 85% of the viewers of Hurdle Hawk, and the

10 https://www.addatimes.com/subscriptions. 89

reality series were below 25 years of age. On the other hand, our content in the horror genre particularly received a bad response.

Addatimes relies on these audience viewing habits to offer a repertoire of movies, original web series, music and sport from its collection. Under the sport category, it offers free live streaming of the Calcutta Football league.11 Mehra (2018) added that a huge scope exists for regional online content creators, as streaming platforms are increasingly expanding their content portfolio in languages other than Hindi and English. For instance, he noted that one of the directors of the web series Khyapa, Korok Murmu (Mulchandani, 2017), was collaborating with Zee5 to direct the portal’s first Bengali language web series titled Kaali (Zee5 announces first Bengali web series, 2018).

Thus, portals like Hoichoi and Addatimes leveraging their understanding of Bengali audiences to create language-specific content that is consumed in East India, Myanmar, Bangladesh and diasporic Bengali-speaking audiences all over the world. These examples highlight how the globalization of technology and services has led a diverse country like India to think globally but also act locally, opening doors for the new generation of storytellers.

Conclusion

In mapping the cultural and industrial practices of 13 streaming platforms/portals, I have shown how platforms and portals use their infrastructure (free uploading of content on platforms as opposed to the selective commissioning of portals) to mobilize selective commissioning of portals in order to influence creator careers as well as maintain their specificity in contributing to the distinctiveness of the Indian NSE. The mapping of 13 platforms/portals also highlights three key factors: diversities, similarities and interdependences in content, pricing and creator strategies.

India is one of the few countries to have so many platforms; however, as we have seen, many of these platforms are trying to bring different value propositions while also proposing distinct business models and pricing in order to compete within the competitive Indian NSE. These value propositions are derived from the combination of services that they seek to offer as well as access to content through bundling practices. Even within the content, specificity is achieved

11 https://www.addatimes.com/sports. 90 by experimenting with genres, languages and partnerships with established multimedia creators and film producers to leverage from their popularity.

One similarity that comes out across the content strategies was the excessive dependence on Bollywood, either through employing of Bollywood practitioners or by acquiring, licensing or commissioning of Bollywood films. Moreover, as evidenced by the content strategies of the platforms and portals, there has been an increasing focus on developing content in regional languages to harness cultural diversity and look beyond the Hindi and English-speaking Indian diaspora, as will be discussed further in chapter 6. Investments such as these offer insights into the commercial aspects of the cultural diversity of India.

Chapter 4 New Screen Ecology narratives about Television

In this chapter, I discuss the various issues that have prompted my cohort of creators to focus their creative energies on NSE content and address Research Question 2 concerning the difference in production cultures between television and the internet. The chapter lays out the evidence for why an emerging segment of new media practitioners is disillusioned by the industrial and cultural practices of television. As we have seen, the NSE has become a site not only for the previously amateur online creators but also for existing television media professionals from diverse departments, including acting, production, direction and casting. As discussed in chapter 1, working at the micro-level (‘standing on the ground’) layer of the critical media industry studies framework (Herbert et al., 2020, 16), the chapter examines the everyday practices of online creators and compares the formal and aesthetic qualities of their textual artifacts with television, as these professionals navigate the larger structural tensions between television and the NSE in India.

An investigation of this issue is significant for my thesis, as the internet came at a time when television was already available to content creators as the prime medium for expressing their creativity. It is therefore critical to analyze the factors that have prompted the shift of talent from television to the online medium, in keeping with the emphasis on interdependency— broadcaster-led portals reliance on broadcaster content and movement of creators from television to NSE—embodied in the concept of the NSE. I argue that the factors that undergird one medium’s practices shape the dynamics of the other media industry, and that the industrial practices of the television industry have played an important role in shaping creator culture on the internet.

I emphasize that the internet has offered greater freedom and less ‘circumscribed agency’ (see Havens and Lotz, 2017, 15) to audio-visual creators as opposed to television. The chapter presents evidence to suggest that the television industry’s production culture limits creators’ ability to express themselves, which means they are unable to fulfill their aspirations of working in the films and on portals. Instead, creators look for opportunities in the NSE (across platforms and portals) due to its production culture and its social proximity (exchange of personnel) with the film industry. By television’s ‘production culture,’ I refer to Indian television’s over-reliance on soap operas and the industrial as well as the cultural logic behind 92

the construction of soap operas, which limits creativity and also impacts creators’ chances of building a portfolio to fulfil their career aspirations. Like Caldwell (2012), my project is grounded in fieldwork and explores the ‘self-ethnographic’ accounts of online creators.

My claims that a more creator-friendly environment exists on the internet have commonalities with Lotz’s (2018) argument that the industrial shift in the television industry from broadcast to cable gave rise to the possibility of a cultural shift. Lotz argues that the advent of cable television changed the creative and business practices of television in the United States in the late 1990s with the introduction of subscription-based cable services. Lotz claims that it was the difference in revenue strategies between advertiser-funded television channels and subscription-based cable television that led to the disruption in storytelling and programming strategies.

In India’s case, it was the greater autonomy on the internet that led creators to develop content to establish their identity. Outside the gatekeeping and hegemonic programming practices of Indian television, creators have been able to experiment and become part of YouTube’s participatory culture (Kay, 2018; Kumar, 2016). Some of the gatekeeping and hegemonic programming practices that I highlight in this include monopoly of select producers across General Entertainment Channels (GEC) for creating fiction content, unruly control of broadcasters over producers due to access of flawed Television Ratings Point (TRP) (see Kumar, 2019), and privileging producers to service social relations. While hierarchies always existed in the areas of creative production between and within above-the-line workers (broadcaster, producer, director, writer) and below-the-line workers (stunt workers, make-up artists, stylists, cameramen), the financial power, access to TRP ratings and the desire to retain informal social elite relations resulted in the overall undermining of creators, creativity and innovation.

In contrast, NSE, beginning with Youtube, promised international exposure and an emerging alternative to those with considerably low social capital. By 2015, about seven years after the introduction of YouTube in India (Kumar 2016), The Viral Fever (TVF) and All India Bakchod (AIB) were the first Indian creator teams to reach one million followers (Gadgets Now Bureau, 2015). By 2019, more than 1200 creators (including 120 women) had reached one million followers (‘India has over 120 women YouTubers,’ 2019). Moreover, unlike television, the NSE’s non-linear programming meant that it had no pressure to fill its daily programming schedule. Through adoption of single or multiple content strategies such as facilitation, 93 aggregation, acquisition and commissioning of diverse content forms and genres (see chapter 3), NSE offered a wider array of creativity and innovative content to choose from.

In what follows, I trace how the proliferation of television channels (see chapter 2) demand to fill inventory space have had direct implications for television content, and thereby creative practices; this has marginalized the work of creative professionals. Second, I chart the industrial practices in the television industry that affect creative potential. To update and focus on the hegemonic practices of broadcasters identified previously by Kay (2018) and Kumar (2016), I draw extensively on fieldwork interviews with my cohort of creators. These creators can be classified into three categories: television renegades, professionalizing amateurs working on platforms/portals, and media professionals working in the film industry, platforms and portals. Third, I compare textual features of Indian television and online genres. I argue that textual differences are caused by a combination of industry lore and the cultural logics of media production.

Television’s Industrial and Cultural Logics

An overwhelming majority of at least 50 of the 66 respondents interviewed for this thesis pointed out at the television industry’s over-reliance on soap operas is the main factor restricting their ability to engage with the medium. Alienation from dominant television content and its craft made the medium unappealing for these media practitioners. KPMG reported that Hindi language General Entertainment Channel (GEC) content dominated television viewership in the first quarter of 2018 (KPMG, 2018, 36). The majority of GEC inventory consists of soap operas and reality shows (Jaggi, 2011). Previous studies (Munshi, 2012; Pant, 2014) also established that soap operas drive maximum viewership and therefore occupy the majority of India’s television programming slots.

Figures from 2018 show that Indian television has 866 channels, with 60 percent of its revenue coming from advertisers (Kathuria et al., 2019) compared with 70 percent in 2012 (Mehta, 2012). As I discussed in chapter 2, the television industry post-liberalization was confronted by the growth of television channels, which struggled to meet the demand to fill inventory. Co- founder of YouTube channel AIB Rohan Joshi (2018) claimed:

As there was such a huge inventory demand, our country became used to the idea of daily programming. There wasn’t enough talent and creativity to meet that 94

demand. This led to a bureaucratic system where one player took control over everything. Balaji (telefilms) saw the opportunity and grabbed it.

Joshi’s claims are not entirely wrong, given that between 2000 and 2008, Balaji Telefilms produced three high-rated soap operas, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu This (Because the Mother-in-Law was Also Once a Daughter-in-Law), Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii (The Story of Every Home) and Kasautii Zindagi Kay (The Trials of Life) (Munshi, 2012, 4). Moreover, the fact that the GEC channels only produce 3.5 hours of original content on average (with the remaining 20.5 hours being reruns) (KPMG, 2018, 36) also limits the possibility of engaging more storytellers who are looking for an opportunity as well as genre diversity – hence the examination of soap opera as a representation of the Indian television industry’s production culture.

While discussing the television industry’s fundamental challenges, Nalin Mehta (2012) argues that the industry suffers from a severe dearth of talent. The then head of Star TV, Uday Shankar, lamented the lack of talent development and training measures as crucial factors affecting television’s content quality. Amrit Gupta, the head of online media company TVF vertical Screenpatti, who has earlier worked in television on a general entertainment program, described its industrial practices as a ‘factory’ that indulged in creating homogenous mass production. Gupta (2018) exposes the ‘ghost-writing’ practice that exists within the television industry:

Multiple writers work for a TV show, but credits for the same are only given to one popular writer. The rest of them (writers) remain unknown, but quite known within the industry as ghost-writers. The main writer is supposed to get the work done from these writers, but the main writer usually does not have the time to invest in teaching or keeping a check which leads to decrease in the quality of content that is being produced.

Gupta’s exposition of the phenomenon of ‘ghost-writing’ is similar to the observations made by Sulati (2016) in her interviews with ‘above the line’ television workers. These experiences indicate the marginalization of creators and reflect the poor industrial practices that are symptomatic of the quality of contemporary television production. 95

Inherent in these critical accounts are the gruelling production schedules that require television to serve content on a daily basis. Indranil Chakraborty (2018), CEO of production company Big Synergy, which has produced over 4500 hours of content across nine languages12 on television as well as for VoD platforms, remarked, ‘Actually, they don’t get time to do anything. The time constraint will not allow you to do anything else. You have to reach the set at 7 am, and you are stuck till 10 pm.’ Chakraborty shares the structural limitations that restrict the television industry from innovation as well as from nurturing talent.

The media system is shaped in such a way that it allows very little room for even the existing professionals to demonstrate their creativity, as was expressed by Rasika Dugal, an actress who has appeared in critically acclaimed television shows such as Powder and P.O.W – Bandi Yuddh Ke (Prisoners [Women] of War). Besides television, Dugal has also acted in several Bollywood films, and in Netflix and TVF web series. Dugal (2018) elaborated on her preference to stay away from a ‘certain’ type of television content despite facing financial issues at one point:

One does not require brains while doing these kinds [soap operas] of television shows. There is no script or character treatment. Most people care only about competing the shooting on time and nothing else. They work for 18 hours straight.

As she highlights, these factors limit the creativity of the script as well as the characters and forces them to look for other media to fulfil their creative aspirations.

In 2016, the popular cultural magazine Caravan published a detailed analysis of the ways in which Indian television soap operas are created by writers who run their plots on the basis of Television Rating Points (hereafter, TRP) and themes that are designed to appeal to the audience’s superstitions and regressive practices (Sulati, 2016). Sarcastically titled ‘Lather, Rinse, Repeat,’ the article uses interviews with television writers and content analysis of popular soap operas to expose the rampant malpractices that exist within the industry, such as ghost-writing, a lack of creator agency and monopolisation of creative output by a few dozen individuals. Delivering a scathing summary of the television’s most-watched general entertainment programs, Sulati (2016) observed:

12 http://www.bigsynergy.tv. 96

The most successful shows across Hindi general entertainment channels, or GECs, have a variety of supernatural elements: black magic, evil spirits, witchcraft and – perhaps the most popular of them all – the mythical Ichchhadhari Naagin, a shape-shifting snake-woman. Obsessed with these tropes, television creates a bizarre alternate reality. In one show, a seemingly innocuous daughter- in-law turns out to be a venomous, shape-shifting snake. On another, the greatest challenge in a woman IPS (Indian Police Service) officer’s life is to save her husband and his family from dark powers. And in period dramas, historical figures such as Ashoka and Akbar ward off seductive naagins (snake-women) while ruling their kingdoms. With more than 50 soap operas being aired across four big networks that run GECs, competition in the industry is fierce. Each time a new idea works, producers descend on it like vultures.

It is pertinent to note that my objective here is not to offer a critique of soap opera or its melodramatic tone. On the contrary, I acknowledge the findings of several feminist scholars who have vividly emphasized the usefulness of soap operas in articulating the issues that confront women in their everyday lives (Ang, 1995; Brunsdon, 1997; Mumford, 1995; Seiter et al., 1989). In her theorization of soap operas, Christine Geraghty (2005, 316) concurs that soap operas are distinct from other dramas in that ‘the centrality of women, and in particular the predominance of stories about families [are] an important element.’ The early studies conducted by Ien Ang (1985) and Seiter and colleagues (1989) have made noteworthy interventions regarding how soap opera narratives have been received by women audiences within the area of audience reception studies. Based on an ethnographic study of 42 letters received from Dutch viewers of US soap opera Dallas, Ang’s (1985) findings demonstrate ‘affective’ and ‘ironic’ ways in which the audience enjoyed Dallas. Ang defined affective pleasure as the audience’s ‘identification with the melodramatic imagination,’ and ironic pleasure as a form of viewing that acknowledges and mocks its melodramatic effect, but nevertheless watches it. Seiter and colleagues’ (2013) study, in particular, looks at how housewives negotiate the tensions between household obligations and soap opera viewing pleasure.

The object of my critique is actually the broadcasters and their cultural understanding of television as a family-viewing medium and its audiences as ‘rural and predominantly women.’ It is this understanding of broadcasters that have alienated my cohort of creators—who are 97

predominantly urban, educated and influenced by international content and the internet audience—from the television. Previous studies (Jaggi, 2011; Munshi, 2012; Rao, 2001) have already highlighted the distinctiveness of Indian soap operas for their ‘larger than life’ sequences featuring overtly melodramatic narratives rendered possible by almost exclusive reliance on ‘flashback’ and ‘close-up’ sequences. The tacit understanding of the industry gatekeepers who assume that this audience would only be able to understand a ‘certain type and construction of melodrama’ has had a cascading effect on the professional lives of creators who, based on the evidence I have gathered, feel that their creativity could be utilized more effectively.

Similarly, the academic literature that I examined (Kay, 2018; Kumar, 2016; Mehta, 2012, Jaggi, 2011; Rao, 2001) alongside my empirical findings illustrates the growing disenchantment that exists among creators due to television’s industrial practices, which are motivated largely by economic reasons. I regard these practices as ‘regressive,’ not because they are soap operas but because it is overkill and results in a lack of diversity in fictional content across the GEC channels. Implicit in this understanding is the failure of Indian soap opera to represent the growing reality of ‘modern’ and ‘urban middle-class’ families – especially Indian women who situate themselves between traditional values and a modern outlook (Rao, 2001, 3). At the same time, the ‘hyper-sensitive’ approach to TRP arising from the dependence on an advertising revenue model has affected television’s ability to produce innovative programming and nurture talent (Mehta, 2012).

Industry Lore

Mehta (2012, 616) states that a lack of talent is one reason for average content marked by ‘low levels of innovation in programming and constant repetition of anything that seemed to work.’ Vivid examples can be drawn from the aesthetics of Indian soap operas that occupy the majority of the inventory of Indian fiction programming (Jaggi, 2011). Based on extensive interviews with a diverse group of Indian television producers, writers, broadcasters and television audience measurement (TAM) executives, as well as textual analysis of five highly rated soap operas between 2000 and 2010, self-confessed soap opera viewer and media researcher Munshi (2012, 210) found that:

Various techniques of representation such as the swish pan shot, thrice repeated, in different colors, at various climactic moments; the ‘recap–precap’ procedure; 98

and the return from the ‘dead’ … which, in Indian soaps, includes plastic surgery to keep pace with new actors entering the show, or the same actors returning with makeovers.

Dorothy Hobson (2003, 67) observes that for the majority of the time in British soap operas, actors are required to ‘produce performances that are understated and low-key, always less than ‘actorly’, for it is their job to create the illusion of the ordinary.’ Indian soap operas, on the other hand, are overtly melodramatic, with several close-up shots that often limit the ability of the actors to deliver quality performances (Munshi 2012, 91).

As someone who interned as an entertainment reporter during his masters course, I recall visiting a set of a high-rated television show, Uttaran, in 2014. For one scene, a dual-camera set-up was organized, only to take close-ups from different angles of an actress looking at the moon through a sieve, celebrating the Hindu festival of Karva Chauth, a custom practiced by women for their husbands’ wellbeing. Throughout the two hours or so that I spent on the set to cover the update of the show, all I witnessed was the same scene being enacted with close-ups of different emotions and slight modification of postures, offering a glimpse of the repetitive narrative identified by Munshi (2012) and Mehta (2012). Munshi (2012) also discussed the career trajectories of key television actors to highlight how the melodramatic overtones of Indian soap operas often led them to be typecast, affecting their ability to seek roles outside the television industry, as argued in interview with veteran actor, writer and producer R. Madhavan, who has worked in Bollywood, television and regional film industries.

Madhavan was one of the first mainstream actors to appear in the web series space, in a critically acclaimed eight-episode Amazon Prime Original series titled Breathe. Madhavan (2018) drew on the example of actor Sumeet Vyas (an ex-television actor who became popular after acting and writing TVF web series), who drew a large following among young audiences after shifting to internet-distributed content, to argue that the industrial logics of the television industry deterred actors from pursuing their craft. Summing up the technical practices characteristic of the television industry, Madhavan (2018) concluded that, ‘Television is basically a medium of close-ups. All the drama on television is in the close-ups, the acting does not really matter.’ Other than money, these creators can rarely leverage the ‘cultural capital’ accumulated by working in Indian soap operas across the Indian media and industry landscape. The lack of genre diversification (Mehta, 2012) and over-reliance on overt drama and close-up shots affect their chances of seeking more creative work. 99

However, it was not just the writers but several professionals from other departments who believed that their careers had been stymied in television. Gupta (2018) recounted a story of his friend who worked on a crime investigation show to give an account of the poor treatment meted out to the television writers:

One of my colleagues, who used to work for television and write crime investigation shows, was given just seven days to write a 40 minutes episode. He was given crime-related cases of just five to six lines and told to create a fictitious story around it. While the entire media industry works on writing software like Celtx and Final Draft for scripts, my colleague was specifically asked to change the script format to a Word document.

The television industry’s failure to adapt in order to adhere to professional standards suggests a lack of recognition towards the contribution of its writers. It also indicates an apathetic attitude towards the development of its writers, who are expected to turn out scripts in a short amount of time with little or no supervision.

Munshi (2012, 50, 58) notes repeatedly in her ethnographic fieldwork on television industry professionals that the producers and broadcasters often feed off each other’s ‘instincts’ and ‘gut-feelings’ to decide ‘what will work.’ These practices marginalise the contributions of creative professionals, who are trained for a specific task. Consider the work of casting agents, who identify and prepare characters for their roles. Their services are generally utilised for their ability to spot these characters’ descriptions through auditions. At times, they also conduct a series of workshops for featured casts to prepare them for the role. Comparing his experience of casting in television as opposed to the films and online mediums, Indian Casting Company co-founder Trishaan Sarkar, whose company has been responsible in casting for mainly Bollywood as well as Hollywood films as well as web series for streaming platforms posited that their company generally abstains from casting in television shows as their methods are often driven by quantity over quality. Sarkar (2018), who has graduated from acting school and often takes up acting roles, observed:

Television depends more on coordinators than casting directors. Coordinators are people who will find a catalogue of actors for the audition of a role as opposed to casting director, who will shortlist five faces as per the brief given to him. 100

Discussing his personal experience of casting for a television show, Life OK, Sarkar added:

For casting three characters, we kept auditioning for 20 days and ultimately chose the actor that the director had mentioned on the first day. The rest two were my choices. Typically, they [producers/broadcasters] have a habit of going through hundreds of auditions before selecting an actor. They are not comfortable if they are shown only three faces and are told to choose from that.

Sarkar’s frustration with the television industry arises from the fact that there is a lack of trust in the work of a casting director, thereby leading to doubt about the quality of their work, which involves ‘casting’ the right actor for the role. Sarkar also highlights the vague selection methods that value quantity over quality, noting that the actors contacting him are often reluctant to take up acting roles in television, building on the prevalent self-theorized fear that they will be ‘treated like a prop on television where there is one wide shot and countless close- ups,’ providing little scope to demonstrate their talent (Sarkar, 2018).

In contrast, creators on platforms/portals rely on the expertise of the casting agent, who has know-how about conducting auditions and identifying actors in accordance with the needs of the script. Explaining this to me was the co-founder of Casting Bay, Abhishek Banerjee. Casting Bay is one of the earliest casting agents to have ventured into casting for online content. Abhishek started as a theatre artist in Delhi. He took up the job of a casting assistant in a feature film, Dev D, where over time he developed passion and acumen for his job; this eventually led him to start his own venture in 2015, along with his colleague Anmol Ahuja (Sengupta, 2018). Banerjee and Ahuja have become prominent in the casting industry due to their experience in casting for feature films and web series.13 In the online space, the duo has worked on most of TVF’s web series, including Permanent Roommates (2014), Tripling (2016) and Yeh Meri Family (This is My Family) (2018). They also partnered with Amazon Prime for casting in web series such as Mirzapur, Hamare Chacha Vidhayak hain (My Uncle is a Legislator) and Inside Edge. While illustrating the influence of the casting agents in web series, Banerjee (2018) emphasized that the casting directors ‘come into the scene’ even before the script is written. They ‘get calls from directors who are not ready with the script.’ While

13 http://mumbainewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2018/03/abhishek-banerjee-anmol-ahuja- co.html. 101 theorizing his practices on the internet and articulating its importance compared with films, Banerjee (2018) argued:

Typically, we are called when the first episode of the web series is written because it takes a lot of time to find the right character for the series. In a movie, one is casting for 150 pages, but for a web series of say, ten episodes, they are casting for 300–350 pages.

Banerjee’s testimony suggests an increasing involvement from creators in the internet production culture as opposed to television. While describing television’s casting practices in his industry lore, he highlights that:

Casting Bay has never even considered casting for television as they are not looking for actors. They are merely looking for faces who will connect with a housewife sitting in Kanpur [a Tier 2 Indian city] or a man in Ranchi [another Tier 2 Indian city] as it is a general entertainment channel. The problem here is that anyone who has a decent talent of delivering a line and looks decent enough on camera can become an actor on television in India. One does not need to drill himself with workshops, training or voice modulations. I have had previous experience in television where actors used to get the script on the morning of the shoot. Television does not need ‘Casting Bay’; they need people who can just provide pretty faces and not creative expertise (Banerjee, 2018)

The perception of their work, and therefore their classification as mere ‘coordinators,’ has also rendered the services of casting agents invisible, further discrediting their line of work. These reasons have pushed casting agents to look for new challenges, and they have focused their services towards online media and films, where their skills are more valued.

Jyoti Kapur Das, who has worked across the film, television and digital mediums as a writer and director, reflected on her experience of working with a regional GEC television channel, Star Pravaha (Marathi language). Kapur Das (2018) confessed that her main motivation for working on television was the ‘huge pay-cheque’ at the end of the month. She narrated how ‘film technicians used to, and even now, look down at working in television’ (Das, 2018). Whatever the reasons are, the creators’ view of television suggests a lack of any motivation other than the economic benefits. The disregard for other creative forces in the engineering of 102 these shows has thus affected the ability of workers to engage creatively. However, at this juncture, it is equally important to note that these production practices have been heavily influenced by the business model of television broadcasters.

Economic Base for Industrial and Cultural Logics

The Indian television channels are heavily dependent on advertisements (which now represent 60 percent of revenue) as compared with a subscription fee, contrary to most developed television industries in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe (Mehta, 2012). This makes the broadcasters very sensitive to television ratings. As Mehta (2012, 620) notes, ‘the structural economy of television forces many channels to focus on content with the lowest common denominator that will register on television rating panels.’ Good ratings mean that the producers/ broadcasters are keen to stretch the storyline on the same constructed sets in order to save costs, even at the expense of creative fatigue. Connecting the dots between the demography of the audience and television programming, Sidharth Ravindran (2018), Marketing Manager at Netflix and an ex-MTV marketer, observed:

Television works on the advertiser’s money. If one looks at its relevant audience today, one has to look where the ratings come in from. They come from smaller towns and rural areas, which means that the storytelling has to be simple enough for them to understand. How this has impacted the content on television is that they have dumbed down their narrative, over-explained the situations (through the narrative), and overall spent a lot of time to seize the situation rather than the reaction of the character.

This explains the deployment of close-ups and taking up screen time in employing ‘swish-pan’ shots, as these strategies increase the length of the episode. As Ravindran (2018) quipped, ‘Television has always been about economies of scale. What I mean is it has always tried to churn out the maximum number of episodes at the best cost possible.’ By indulging in these industrial practices, the broadcasters are able to shoot many episodes on a single set. This helps them to reduce their production costs while also benefiting from the everyday viewing of the audience, who are heavily invested in the character and do not mind the stretched narrative. At the same time, Ravindran’s industry lore of the television audience as ‘rural’ as well as Mehta’s (2012) view of them as the ‘lowest common denominator’ warrant further attention. 103

Owing to the digital and urban–rural divide in India, there is a populist perception that television is construed as a medium for the masses as opposed to one for individuals. It is a ‘collectivist’ escape medium that encourages family viewing (Mankekar, 1998), given that most houses in India own only a single television set (KPMG, 2018). Thus, broadcasters make systematic attempts to create soap operas that are universal and family-friendly. Even socially, most states in India still follow a patriarchal system whereby men go out to work and women are expected to take care of the family for various reasons like family expectations, social stigma, male domination, literacy (see Jensen, 2012; Jayachandran, 2015, Klasen and Pieters, 2015, McKelway, 2019). While this may not be true in all urban and developed metropolitan cities, large swathes of rural areas are closed to different philosophies, owing to a lack of exposure to the internet, education and, more importantly, resources that allow for reflection beyond survival and maintenance of a standard of living.

There are strong reasons for the rural focus, even though the treatment (lack of talent and content development measures) may not quite be justified. First, as I discussed earlier, 70 per cent of the Indian population still belongs in rural areas with lack of digital infrastructure, leading them to depend on television as their single source of entertainment. Partho Dasgupta, the CEO of the Broadcast Research Council of India (hereafter, BARC), the nodal agency for issuing television ratings, highlighted two of the pertinent rural India practices that complement the current television industry’s focus on rural audiences, as Dasgupta (2017) observed in 2017:

[About] 96.5 percent of the total of 183 million television-viewing households (now 197 million) are single-TV households. This suggests that affluence may have led to the purchase of other consumer durables than opting to purchase a second Television. The unique Indian habit of the entire family sitting together prevails. Urban India may have 84 million of the total 183 million television households, with penetration of close to 87%. But rural India has overtaken it with 99 million television households, even as television penetration remains 52%.

Television’s obsession with the TRP system often comes at the expense of creative inputs of ‘above the line’ workers who feel marginalized by its creation practices. This has led broadcasters to react in quite a sinister way, adopting ‘lazy programming and taking short cuts to register high on the ratings, somehow, anyhow – whatever the cost’ (Mehta, 2012, 621). The 104

cost was losing talent, as television now has a direct competitor in the internet. At the same time, enough empirical as well as academic evidence exists to suggest the gendered notion of television consumption. As Kumar’s (2010) key analysis of Indian television programming post-1990 argues, content across television channels was constructed to evoke an identity of post-colonial ‘nationalism’ that drew upon a ‘collective sense of familial and cultural heritage’ (2010, 178). The concept of familial values, however, is deeply rooted in the patriarchal history of India, and it has contributed to creating a certain type of content that alienated the creators even further.

Gendered Perception of Television

While analyzing soap operas produced in 2017, a journalist observed that ‘Women in television serials are either black-magic performing witches, docile daughters-in-law or exist only to protect or take care of another character’ (Nair, 2017). In an analysis of the construction of identities and the portrayal of socio-cultural aspects of television soap operas post-2008, feminist media scholar Ruchi Jaggi (2011, 146) notes that the media texts ‘provide a lot of opportunities to include ritualistic and religious elements to construct stereotypical, traditional narratives.’ Malhotra and Rogers (2000) concur in their study of 10 top-rated television programs in 1997 that while women assumed greater visibility and had an increased screen presence, an abysmal 10 percent of women characters worked outside the home as opposed to 95 percent of men characters, indicating characterizations conforming to patriarchal and national interests. In her critical commentary on Indian soap operas, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because Mother-in-law was Once Daughter-in-law), Fazal (2009) notes that television has failed to mediate the lives of urban middle-class families, modern Indian women and their lived experiences. Moorthy (2007, 13) corroborates this analysis in her study of prime-time programming on Indian television: ‘Independent women are presented as those requiring regulation and by the narrative’s end revert to being doormats or shadows.’ This evidence reflects television’s failure to imagine an urban Indian community and an industry that is blinded to the sociocultural reality of working women as well as the nuclear family.

Despite a celebratory account of soap operas, Munshi (2012) notes that the shows revolve around the conflicts between the ‘mother-in-law’ and ‘daughter-in-law,’ and the latter’s idealistic portrayal to impress the former. The story is unveiled in the post-marital home, where the couple lives with the husband’s entire family in a traditional joint family arrangement. The narratives are strategically targeted at Indian households with a patriarchal structure, where it is 105

common for married women to stay at home while their husbands go to work. While it is not unusual for children to live with their parents after marriage, these shows indulge in the objectification and vilification of some characters – in most cases, women. Soap operas consistently reinforce the patriarchal value system by demonstrating that it is only the self- sacrificing nature of women that help them to overcome situations of conflict. These conflicts are mostly planted inside homes, overtly posturing towards women’s role as a homemaker. At the same time, from a production perspective, an indoor shoot will always cost less.

At the same time, shooting episodes with sluggish narratives featuring women protagonists is another example of catering to a skewed female audience. This was gestured to by TVF Creative Director Nidhi Bisht (2018):

The narrative of these shows is usually structured in such a way that the housewives can watch these shows while cooking or other everyday household activities. For instance, the narrative is deliberately sluggish to allow them to catch up even if they are caught up doing their household activities.

Bisht (2018) highlights the deep-rooted patriarchy that assumes that women are expected to take care of household chores. Jain and Pareek (2018) note from their study of gender portrayal on 30 family soap operas from 1990 to 2016 that females are often relegated to perform domestic chores as opposed to men. Indira Somani and Marissa Doshi’s (2016) study of portrayals of women in Indian soap operas with 100 diasporic Indians across the United States make similar assertations; they argue that the ‘image of Indian women that was being portrayed was that of a ‘vamp’ or someone manipulative and not family-oriented.’ Conforming to familial values that celebrate patriarchy has continued to mediate television content right up to the present day, alienating young and urban audiences as well as the creators. This is simply due to the fact that about 98% of the television consumption is carried out on single-TV households (Jha, 2018).

Evidently, the dual effect of antique industrial practices and regressive content has severely impacted the creative aspirations of creators as the differences between them and the broadcasters over what works and what does not keep growing. Dugal (2018) argued that:

We [producers, television broadcasters] are not doing justice by bracketing our audience into several headings by saying that ‘this audience is there on television 106

and a particular type of audience is there on digital.’ A person who watches ‘saas- bahu’ sagas [meaning family dramas around the mother-in-law and daughter-in- law relationship] shows can even watch Powder. It is not right to think that a person will watch only a particular type of content. Often, creators on television make shows that are path-breaking in terms of the content that is being created but then in the middle of these shows, the broadcasters get scared because of losing TRPs and try to ‘switch’ to make the content more commercialized. There is a kind of feudalism that exists on this medium, where broadcasters try to dictate what will work.

Powder, a gripping limited-episode narrative that sought to reveal the underbelly of the narcotics trade in Mumbai – in which Dugal acted – was discontinued due to low ratings. Powder was also recently acquired by Netflix for distribution on its platform.14 Dugal’s first- hand experience offers a clear account of the contemporary tensions between the creators and broadcasters over the preoccupation with TRP, contributing to a history of scepticism about the television measurement system (Mehta, 2012). These reasons have combined to contribute to the migration of talent to online media.

As has been evident from the creators’ views, they continue to compare the production practices of soap operas with the work offered in the NSE to highlight the distinctive work opportunities available. Often, in these discourses, they refer to fiction storytelling on the internet, such as sketches and long-form content (web series) as the basis for the distinction. In order to analyze these distinctions in detail, the next section will focus on the gratification that the creators seek in working on the internet. Similarly, select media texts created by digital media companies are analyzed to unpack the contextual differences that exist in the portrayal of content. Findings suggest that repetitive and regressive content programming on television has served as a creative counterpoint for online media creators. In fact, the cinematic techniques employed in Indian soap operas, such as the ‘swish-pan shot,’ the endless frames and generation-leaps, are popularly deployed as objects of humor, parody and satire on the internet.

14 https://scroll.in/reel/869836/cult-tv-series-powder-is-finally-getting-the-platform-and- attention-it-deserves?fbclid=IwAR2eqS-VY_Q6lZGG- PCPAD1ZktwJvpfZLDsO2MwczC6eafaCRQk5f4ngVgU. 107

Moving towards NSE

While discussing the reasons for introducing the AltBalaji portal, the Chief Operating Officer, Sunil Nair, noted:

AltBalaji’s reason for existence is the fact that the Indian TV industry over the last 27 to 30 years has kind of morphed in a strange manner where the GECs caters to women and largely the rural audience. (Nair, 2018)

AltBalaji is a subsidiary of the popular television production house Balaji Telefilms, which has run a host of highly-rated television shows. Ironically, it was Balaji Telefilms that brought the ‘saas-bahu’ sagas to the fore; as already discussed, these shows have been widely critiqued for their creative and programming practices. In fact, Altbalaji’s recent multi-seasonal television show Naagin (Snake Women), although performing excellently for the television channel due to high TRPs, was berated for its regressive content. That a leading television production house opened a separate vertical and named it Altbalaji, with the logo ‘everything that’s not TV,’ makes another distinction between television and internet content. At the same time, ALTBalaji’s branding is reflective of the audience segmentation that is well accepted within the creator fraternity – even if it is detrimental to the quality of television content.

Contrary to soap operas, Indian web series come with a limited length of 10–15 episodes. In India, some of the most popular soap operas have run into more than a thousand episodes (Munshi, 2012). Web series on streaming media services such as Pitchers (TVF and YouTube), Breathe (Amazon Prime), Sacred Games (Netflix), Chukyagiri (Arré), Tripling (TVF and YouTube) and Humorously Yours (TVF and YouTube) have all had single-digit episodic runs. Long-form internet web series like Pitchers and Permanent Roommates, among many others, tackle issues of entrepreneurs and live-in relationships, which find greater resonance among the young audiences and creators than the stories about family sagas that are more common to television. The internet is not only the medium of convenience for creators and audiences but also forms part of the realities and identities of young urban Indians, with its selection of stories. For most of these individuals, the stories of live-in relationships and entrepreneurs are cathartic and represent ‘their’ everyday stories of struggle, choices and aspirations.

Consider, for instance, the first Indian web series, Permanent Roommates (2015), produced by TVF in 2015. Permanent Roommates traces the story of a couple (Mikesh and Tanya) in a 108

three-year long-term relationship, wanting to get married. Mikesh’s insistence on marriage and Tanya’s subsequent reluctance lead them to a compromise where both agree to a live-in relationship as a testing period for marriage. The first season ends with a fallout between the two. The second season begins with a run-up to their marriage, where Tanya’s and Mikesh’s families meet each other. However, things take a surprising turn as Tanya finds out she is pregnant. The series tackles issues of live-in relationships and premarital pregnancy, both of which are common for urban middle-class audiences and would not be aired on television. The content on the online medium has also received a favorable response from Indian millennials and cosmopolitan audiences who relate to this content as opposed to television soap operas (Kay, 2018, 4).

The writers of the web shows identify with these young audiences and possess ‘lived experiences’ that are relatable. Writer/director/actor Dhruv Sehgal – who works for digital media company Pocket Aces Pvt Ltd, which produces sketches and web series on its multiple YouTube channels as well as for Netflix – argued that while writing, ‘he wants his craft to be as close to reality as possible’ (Sehgal, 2018), so he ‘writes stories by keeping in mind the characteristics of people he lives with.’ The company’s founders encouraged Sehgal to come up with ‘relatable content.’ Having shifted to Mumbai from Delhi, he came up with the story of a ‘Delhi boy, living in Mumbai,’ which eventually culminated in a popular web series, Little Things15 (IMDB 8.3) on YouTube, with an average viewership of five million. Little Things essentially chronicle the story of the everyday life of a young couple in a live-in relationship in Mumbai. The primary characters, a Ph.D. student played by Sehgal and a sales executive played by Mithila Palkar, reflect the lifestyle and choices of young, educated, urban Indians. The narrative of the show highlights the everyday anxieties associated with careers and relationships and how the characters deal with them.

It is difficult to raise these issues on television, which still depicts the customs and traditions of traditional India in its prime-time fiction programming. Ekta Kapoor, the co-founder of Balaji Entertainment Pvt Ltd, confessed in an interview:

The Internet is your new private life. Putting content on TV [meant for the internet] is actually saying, ‘You now watch it here, with your family.’ And, the families are not ready for it. I do not think things will change on TV because the

15 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6522580/?ref_=nv_sr_2?ref_=nv_sr_2s. 109

youth and the people, who want more individualistic stories, will walk away from the medium. (Pathak, 2017)

For Kapoor and several channel programmers, as well as television producers, television is primarily a medium for the family, and the internet is for the youth. The narrative of Mikesh and Tanya, while being watched online by new audiences, is not perceived to be palatable for family audiences. It is almost as if both the mediums are portraying different ‘realities’ of modern India.

Sehgal (2018) further explained how he kept the conversations real and grounded. For instance, from his own experience, he elaborated how migration from Delhi to Mumbai could lead to different pronunciations and further provide depth to the character and the story setting:

As I belong to Delhi, my pronunciation is different for certain words. I cannot pronounce the word ‘Panda’ correctly. So, when I was making a web series in which one of the characters was also from Delhi, I intentionally used the wrong pronunciation of the word ‘Panda.’ However, I do believe that it is good to commit mistakes as the internet is not supposed to be ‘pretty,’ but is supposed to be ‘real.’

The online creator culture allows Sehgal to use his experience in writing for the internet (YouTube, Netflix). Sehgal (2018) argued that the online medium ‘offered more opportunities for experimentation.’ Actor Naveen Kasturia, who has acted in Hindi feature films as well as short films, sketches and web series on YouTube, Zee5, Altbalaji and Voot,16 acknowledged that the success of TVF Pitchers (2015) made him ‘popular within the Indian media industry’ (Kasturia, 2018).

According to Arunabh Kumar, the founder of The Viral Fever (a YouTube Channel and now a portal), the lack of enthusiasm shown by television channels for a parody show prompted him and his friends to launch their TVF (The Viral Fever) YouTube Channel. TVF is India’s first YouTube channel to have acquired a million subscribers in 2015 based on original content. Arunabh elaborated in an interview that youth television channel MTV and several media conglomerate broadcasters had rejected his ideas for spoofs and parodies around popular Indian youth shows (Dwivedi, 2013). However, the availability of an open-access platform like

16 https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3832707/ 110

YouTube allowed creators like Kumar to give expression to his creative vision. Kumar joined the bandwagon of online content creators who have been disappointed by the rigid operational practices of Indian broadcasters, who, the creators think are averse to experimentation and have a limited view of what works on television. With the advent of digital media, for the first time, the creators did not have to rely on the mercy of traditional mediums to exercise their vision. In many ways, TVF has forged a unique place for itself. The success of its shows has prompted the team to launch a new portal, TVFPlay (see chapter 3). Interestingly, as I entered the TVF office, I was greeted by the self-explanatory TVF logo (Figure 4.1), which is quite similar to HBO’s ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO.’

Figure 4.1 Photograph of TVF logo outside its office

Rajiv Mehra, the founder of Bengali language-specific VoD platform Addatimes and a well- known producer with over two decades of experience in the Bengali language television industry, argued in the interview that Addatimes was launched primarily because of his disturbing experience as a television producer with Bengali television’s organization and creative practices. Mehra pointed out that these reasons prompted him to start Addatimes, where he could also engage with young creators to create new and innovative content.

This also holds true for Chhavi Mittal, who left her long, illustrious television career to run a digital media company named Shitty Ideas Trending (SIT), along with ex-television actor Mohit Hussein. SIT operates predominantly on social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, where they create sketches and web series for an online audience. Reflecting on her transition from television to the internet, Mittal (2018) said:

Television is catering to a certain section of the society who are expecting the shows to be a family drama, melodramatic and all that. I was kind of bored of doing all that. I have done stuff on Shitty Ideas (SIT) that I never thought I could 111

do in life or that I was capable of doing in my life. In my previous experience, I only used to act. I was given a script in hand, and I was expected to deliver those lines as per the character’s demand. I was good at that, but I did not know that I could be a writer or producer. With SIT, I have done sound engineering too.

For Chhavi Mittal, the online medium is an ecosystem that has allowed her to foster her creativity by reprising ‘exciting’ roles, exploring ‘newer forms of storytelling’ and, more importantly, challenging herself to ‘try her hand’ at other departments of filmmaking without conforming to stereotypes.

The participatory culture of YouTube allowed Mittal and her husband, actor Mohit Hussein, to quit their television careers and create a YouTube content channel. What started as a hobby soon developed into a fully-fledged digital media entity as SIT developed sketches as well as web shows in collaboration with brands on YouTube. Mittal’s career trajectory, along with Chakraborty’s, shows how television’s rigid industrial conventions and ‘high-risk’ factors associated with mass viewing make it difficult for television workers to experiment in multiple departments. At the same time, having a self-funded YouTube channel also means that one has to be good at multi-tasking in order to cut costs. For creators like Mittal, Hussein and Sehgal, digital media offers greater agency and experimentation, even at the risk of financial precarity.

Madhavan argued that the preparation for films was on par with digital media content, where the performances and treatment were superior due to the fixed number of episodes and fast- paced treatment. Madhavan’s testimony is particularly evident in a case where popular Hindi film actor Rajkumar Rao shaved half his head to look like the real-life character of freedom fighter Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in Altbalaji’s streaming media service historical drama web series Bose: Dead or Alive (2017), thereby earning rave reviews from critics and audiences alike (IMDB 9.1).17 The agency, as well as the social and cultural capital that actors receive from the internet-based content owing to its relatable character graphs, witty dialogues and a fixed number of episodic shows, make it a lucrative medium for expression. Unlike soap operas, internet dramas offer a time-bound commitment and do not tie actors down to a never- ending saga that restricts them from taking other roles. The absence of genre diversity on television has also contributed to the fatigue of actors.

17 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6883044. 112

Conclusion

The informal practices of television programming limit the perceived creative autonomy of creators, who find the online space more flexible and creatively demanding. As I have argued in this chapter, these very informal practices drive the NSE industrial practices and link platform-portal creator cultures. The industry lore of self-ethnographic practices across both these mediums suggests that there is more agency, freedom and job satisfaction on the internet. The online medium is also aspirational for creators due to the opportunities it offers in terms of fame, creativity and reach.

The ‘on-field’ informal screen cultures and practices of television are why creators overlook television, as it is increasingly seen as a medium that limits their creativity. I have highlighted the fractured cultural and industrial logics and practices of television broadcasters emanating from its economic factors. I have also attempted to diversify the voices of the creator labor by including casting agents, actors, writers, producers and directors. These voices have shared similar apprehensions of what television has come to be, but more importantly, how the industrial logics of internet-distributed content are different and therefore more appealing compared with television.

While in some cases incumbent television actors from the television industry have protested against doing the ‘same kind’ of shows, the dip in ratings for ‘supernatural’ genre shows such as Vish ya Amrit (Poison or Nectar) and Tantra (Magic) hoping to follow the success of Naagin (Snake Woman) have forced the television broadcasters to shut these shows down and rethink their content strategies (‘Supernatural-genre-is-fading-away,’ 2019. Moreover, the 2018 EY report noted that ‘while Indian broadcasters produce over 100,000 hours of content annually across languages and formats, newer players (portals) are investing higher amounts per episode (albeit for much smaller quantities of content) and are taking up with leading talent.’ My cohort was relentless in critiquing television’s industrial practices – so it did not come as a surprise when Sidharth Anand (2018), Vice President (Films and TV) for Saregama, claimed:

I have been working in the television industry for 15 years as a professional before joining Saregama (Music Label and content production company). It is a place where creativity dies. I think that it is very unhealthy for the creative soul of our country. I also know as an insider in the business that broadcasters are scared 113

because talent does not want to work with them. The best talent wants to work on web series or feature films.

From the perspective of my interview cohort, television broadcasters have grown comfortable with offering a similar type of content to an audience, which has been limited by viewing choices and restricted by the infrastructure to explore alternative options. With the increase of internet penetration across the country and increasingly affordable internet prices audiences will be exposed to diverse genres and styles of content and will therefore be more discerning in their choice of consumption. This may lead to a major restructure of the television industry, where both the programming and the creative practices might be reconfigured to address the pressing concerns of talent and audience migration.

This has also allowed for more experimentation, which in turn has led the platforms/portals to flourish in India and establish themselves as a competitive medium within the screen culture that challenges the cultural and industrial dominance of the film and television industry. In the next chapter, I will highlight the significant aspects of the industrial culture of the online creators, such as their quotidian practices, working conditions, identity construction, non- hierarchical corporate structure and localization practices. I will show how today’s Indian creators are ambitious and more willing to produce content that can be consumed globally. They believe that their content will reach beyond India through an infrastructure undoubtedly offered by the NSE.

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Chapter 5 Indian Online Creator Culture

In this chapter, I analyze the impact of emerging industrial practices on working conditions within India’s new screen ecology and consider the implications of these conditions for the broader Indian media-entertainment landscape. Building from the previous chapter’s analysis of the creator cohort’s attitudes to television’s industrial and cultural dynamics, here I demonstrate how creators perform agency while negotiating with social media platforms and use it as a form of capital to collaborate with portals as well as film industries. I articulate how online creators deal with precariousness on social media as well as through social media, as they balance the structural tensions between traditional media and platforms as well as portals. This chapter addresses Research Question 2 concerning the creator’s contribution to the distinctiveness of the Indian new screen ecology.

I probe the reasons behind some Indian creators’ preference for social media as a pathway into the professional industry in two ways. First, I highlight the multimodal practices of content creators (Cunningham and Craig, 2017), who typically use social media to promote their talent in stand-up comedy or acting or in content genres such as sketches and web series. I trace the pathways of select online content creators to discuss the strategic ways in which creators organize themselves and use platforms as a calling card to demonstrate a range of creative work that serves as a skill-based portfolio for seeking projects (McRobbie, 2002) in media industries. Second, I discuss the everyday practices of creators who co-produce content on platforms to seek status among social media communities as well as develop sustainable enterprises. Building commercial and social capital helps the Indian creators to deal with precarity and negotiate relationships as they navigate the hierarchical structures of India’s media industries.

By commercial capital, I allude to the revenue gathered from creator labor on platforms and portals. While working on platforms, creators aspire to build a relationship with advertisers and audiences alike. Monetization opportunities accrued from sponsorships, advertorials, and subscriptions are direct means of earning revenues from platforms. Social capital is one of the byproducts of social media in that the popularity of creators on social media gives opportunities for monetization on films and portals. The creators use their social media portfolio to partner with film and portal practitioners. In this way, the creators use their success to move from UGC to PGC set-ups and navigate the entry barriers to films and portals. 115

Such an understanding of social capital is borrowed from Bourdieu’s (1985, 248) definition of social capital that recognizes its intangibility and defines it as the ‘aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition.’ A social media creator’s resources, when observed from this perspective, constitute their popularity amongst a potential ‘400 million’ online Indian video viewers (see KPMG, 2020, 66), making them a prospective asset for selling audio-visual content.

I argue that many creators would prefer to deal with precarious creativity on social media platforms than to deal with the hegemonic production practices and closed-door networks of Indian traditional media. The approach to platforms and eventually portals is one pathway for both individuals and institutions, as it allows them to navigate the informality of traditional media industries while also embracing the precarity of algorithmic culture. I show this by highlighting through varied examples how this manifest among my cohort of interlocutors. Instead of attempting to break into socially elite circuits, creators take up less remunerative and more labor-intensive works on social media in the hope of gaining popularity.

As I will show, the multi-tasking characteristic of social media, which is essentially a method of keeping the costs of production low, also serves as a useful exercise in skill-building and demonstration of adaptable talent. At the same time, rather than classifying the creators based on social media affordances (such as amateurs and user-generated content), this chapter highlights the ‘sense-making’ of content creators and their strategic use of YouTube and Facebook to achieve cultural and commercial forms of capital to work with portals and film producers. In doing so, I balance chapter 3’s top-down emphasis on the platform/portal centricity with a bottom-up focus on the centricity of creators.

Positioning Online Creators

Advances in communication and technology have generated much scholarly interest in the affordances of online media (e.g., Hutchby, 2001; Nagy and Neff, 2015; Postigo, 2016). Media businesses must evolve to cater to the shift in media consumption and creation practices (Cunningham and Silver, 2013). The new wave of media globalization allows for more frictionless content creation and sharing seamlessly across boundaries or mediascapes (Kumar, Mohan, and Punathambekar, forthcoming). New norms and forms of content creation have exposed viewers to themes, narratives and ideas for content creation, and this has led to a rise in 116

the number of content creators with no prior professional experience in the creative industries. A staggering number of videos, songs and other types of creative content have been uploaded to various platforms by amateur creators over the past decade (Bruns, 2008; Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). Creative content is no longer constrained by the availability of high production budgets or the influence of various media gatekeepers, such as film and television studios (Hargittai and Walejko, 2008). This shift has disrupted traditional models of content creation and catalyzed changes in sociocultural content creation and consumption patterns.

Previous studies distinguish these creators with labels such as ‘produsers’ (Bruns, 2008), ‘creative workers, bloggers, content creators’ (Duffy and Hund, 2015), ‘alternative media producers’ (Caldwell, 2009), ‘influencers’ (Abidin, 2016), ‘micro-celebrities’ (Senf, 2008), ‘amateur digital content creators’ (Jenkins et al., 2013) and ‘vloggers’ (Burgess and Green, 2018). Cunningham and Craig (2019, 49) distinguish between creators on social media platforms who create UGC (user-generated content) and those insiders who create PGC (professionally generated content) for platforms such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. Keen (2007, 2–3) critiques the former as ‘mediocre’ or ‘low-quality’ content, while Cunningham and Craig (2019, 52) highlight how ‘most creators are not writer-director-producer wannabees’ or ‘hobbyists.’ Rather than focusing on the differences between platforms and portals in the new screen ecology (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Jenkins et a., 2013; Keen, 2007) and distinguishing the creators on the basis of platform/portal affordances, this study emphasizes online creators’ perceptions of the NSE dynamics to highlight NSE’s distinctiveness in linking the formal-informal media economies.

As discussed in chapter 1, despite the lack of formal storytelling or media-management backgrounds of some of these creators, their success and ability to develop opportunities outside the social media space challenge the preconceptions of what constitutes ‘amateur’ or ‘professional.’

Precarious Creativity

Content creators in India have been quick to identify this demand and have begun to create content on social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, the reasons for which were discussed in chapters 1 and 2. These platforms afford creators greater creative autonomy while enabling the use of platform analytics for monetization (Burgess and Green, 2018). Further evidence of the rise and popularity of Indian online content creators can be observed from 117

YouTube’s growth in India to 265 million monthly active users and over 1200 creators with over one million subscribers (YouTube media release, 2019).

The advent of the internet has seen fundamental changes in creator labor conditions (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). Several scholars have pointed out that digital media labor raises deeper concerns than simply the celebration of its participatory culture, criticizing the internet as the new medium of labor exploitation for capitalist motives (Arvidsson, 2005; Cohen, 2008; Terranova, 2004). Critics of online creator labor draw from the Marxist notion of uncompensated labor and unaccounted surplus labor. Media scholar Alex Callinicos (2009, 68) describes this as a situation in which ‘workers are compelled to sell their labor-power to the capitalists on terms that lead to their exploitation.’ Scholars such as Terranova (2004) and Miller (2010) warn against premature celebrations over the prospect of the creation of jobs by the new media economy. Terranova (2004), for instance, has developed the concept of immaterial labor to show how the new media economy exploits free labor in return for capital accumulation.

The concept of immaterial labor was used earlier in Lazzarato’s labor study, in which he defined it as ‘the labor that produces the information and cultural content of the commodity’ (Lazzarato, 1996, 133). However, it was Terranova’s interest in studying the digital economy that contributed significantly to the scope of further studies in areas of user-generated content. She contends that the new media economy’s creation and consumption practices echo capitalistic traits by relying on the affective labor of users. These dynamics are systematically disguised by celebrating voluntary and unpaid work as a contribution to knowledge. Miller (2010) argues that ‘precarity and flexibility’ are the new labor norms. He draws comparisons between the culture of traditional and new media labor classes and posits that the new labor class functions under the notions of freedom and flexibility.

Arvidsson (2005, 235) argues that brands productively utilize the free labor of consumers to their advantage by creating ‘social bond, shared experience and common identity.’ Similarly, Cohen (2008, 18), in a study of Facebook’s political economy, argues that the platform encourages ‘free or immaterial labor for the purpose of capital accumulation.’ Duffy and Hund (2015) suggest similarities between traditional media labor and digital media labor working conditions in their study of women fashion bloggers. They argue that while the bloggers worked under the notion of authenticity, social belonging and participatory culture, they were subjected to traditional labor conditions, which are governed by hierarchy, the marketplace and 118

quantifiable objectives. The scholars define these conditions as aspirational labor practices taken up by women to confirm unpaid labor practices in the hope that it will generate social capital returns.

Precarity in the Indian Media Landscape

In the Indian context, Kumar (2016) discusses the precarious creativity of online creator labor in India through his study of five creative entrepreneurs from diverse genres, including vlogging, cooking and fashion blogging. These entrepreneurs are finding it difficult to achieve sustainability owing to YouTube’s changing algorithm and growing competition. It is no surprise that YouTube’s algorithms are not designed to reward merit or quality, and the successes are less frequent than the failures (Kumar, 2016). In acknowledging Kumar’s (2016) findings regarding the precarity of the new screen ecology, my analysis shows how both individuals and firms develop strategies that allow them to move back and forth across various components of the ecology as a way to establish a career pathway towards success. Therefore, while the term ‘precarious’ may be useful for foregrounding our understanding of the political economy of digital media, there are inherent complexities that are distinct to the Indian new media landscape and that need to be contextualized in order to capture the whole picture of contemporary Indian digital labor practices.

As a worker within the content development team of a corporate, creative set-up (Viacom18) across films and online vertical for three years, I often witnessed my colleagues’ profiling screen incumbents (writers, actors, directors, independent producers, stand-up comedians) based on their prior experience, even before they had pitched their ideas. The risk-taking quotients in genres, as well as new voices, were extremely rare. Often the same traditional media professionals would end up getting work opportunities due to being part of privileged creator and producer circuits. Their requests for collaboration are often prioritised over any of the newcomers. This practice contrasts with the new screen ecology where, as Viacom18 (Voot)’s digital content producers, we proactively sought meetings with popular social media creators and talent agents (see chapter 7) who managed social media creators.

As discussed in chapter 4, the industrial practices in the overall Indian film and television industry have a well-documented history of being ‘hegemonic,’ with broadcasters and studio executives having the final say on every creative decision (Kay, 2018; Kumar, 2016). Similarly, I have raised the issue of how the general entertainment television channels only produce an 119 average of 3–3.5 hours of original content per day (FICCI-EY, 2018, 36), a task often handed out to the same producers on a regular basis. Third, the issue of censorship on television remains an obstacle for creators, who are looking to YouTube and Facebook as a ‘dynamic outlet in which discourses of the nation, identity, censorship, feminism and representation’ are undertaken (Kay, 2018, 1). A lack of governmental regulations and a lesser degree of circumscribed agency compared with the television industry has helped social media to facilitate an emerging pool of creators who are looking to experiment with diverse forms of storytelling.

The creators discussed here have medium-agnostic creator aspirations but are not part of the elite cultural hierarchy and are precarious due to their inefficient exclusion. By negotiating their creativity on social media, creators – as well as media companies specializing in digital content creation – are gaining wider acceptance from the online audience for their creativity and then using it as a form of currency for circulation within the overall Indian media-entertainment landscape. At the same time, the intelligence of the creators in negotiating the algorithmic capitalistic logics of the social media platforms (as distinct from traditional media’s capitalistic logics), and materializing their aspirations, places them on the same side of the equation as the powerful platform/portals in the digitized economy. In other words, they deal with precarity by serving and supporting capitalist structures that reproduce the same inequalities they are meant to address (Herman and McChesney, 2003). However, the availability of social, economic and cultural capital derived by serving in the digitized economy still offers a better chance of building a meaningful career as an outsider because social media affordances provide newcomers with a chance to express themselves.

At the same time, it is essential to note that the findings do not negate Sangeet Kumar’s (2016) critical intervention concerning the precarious nature of India’s social media creators. As pointed out by my respondents, the precarity at an everyday level arises from various factors such as consistency of content creation, choosing a topic for creation, imagining a community in terms of relevance, searching for brand partnerships, networking for collaboration with fellow social media creators and offline networking with industry practitioners, to list a few. The uncertainties of work in the digital media economy are too obvious to be overlooked; however, the preference for dealing with this kind of precarity as opposed to waiting for traditional media to spot one’s talent is what sets the digital economy apart. This is because the hope of building on the fame and creativity produced on social media as a calling-card for 120

gathering work of preferred choice across the Indian media entertainment landscape overrides the precarity that creators experience on social media platforms. Additionally, while the precarity of the new screen ecology seems paler in comparison to the gatekeeping practices of the traditional media, it also faces imminent challenges in the form of censorship and unsafe working conditions for women. Before highlighting these challenges, I will first analyze the business practices of the new media ecology.

New Business Practices

In adopting a bottom-up approach (‘ground level’) and building upon the ‘helicopter’ level mapping of the platforms and portals (see chapter 3), I asked online creators to elucidate their daily content creation practices to highlight the distinct emerging practices within the new screen ecology. As I argue, these online practices enable them to survive within the Indian media industries.

Strategic Approaches to Labor

I call these practices ‘strategic approaches to labor’; in turn, they influence how creators construct their identity and the ‘non-hierarchical corporate structures’ within which they interact, as evinced by brand partnerships and organizational practices. By non-hierarchical corporate structures, I mean organizational structures that are similar to those of corporations but operate with greater agency. The strategies adopted by creators in relation to their creative labor reflect the multifarious nature of labor in the online content creation space. My cohort of creators stated that their creative digital labor was spread across a variety of platforms, indicating no strong preference for one platform over another. When asked about the different approaches to publishing content across various platforms, comedian Sorabh Pant replied that ‘Everything is almost becoming each other … it is all merging into one’ (Pant, 2017). As platforms add new features, such as Facebook’s live video or YouTube’s status update features, creators are becoming more platform-agnostic, preferring to increase their presence across a spectrum of digital platforms and cross-posting certain content. As Cunningham and Craig (2019) note, while multi-modal practices help to mitigate risks, they also increase the burden of extra labor as different platforms require a different content presentation.

Independent online creators explained how they split their daily activity between traditional creative labor, such as writing, rehearsing and performing, and digital media labor, such as 121

posting, responding to comments and sharing others’ content. Frequent posting on social media is an important part of building and maintaining audience engagement. Sorabh Pant (2017) explained that his posting habits on social media include, ‘Twitter probably about ten times a day, Facebook about six times a day, Instagram and Snapchat about six times a day, and YouTube, about once a week.’ There is significant pressure on online content creators to consistently post content on social media in order to keep up the engagement through comedy sketches and memes that are a low investment but are likely to resonate with their audience. Maintaining such an active online presence keeps creators involved in ongoing discussions and enables them to remain aware of moving trends, not to mention previewing or advertising upcoming content. Interacting with fans also makes up a portion of the creators’ online activity. As Brahma Raval (2017) pointed out, ‘I also acknowledge [my fans] by liking their comments … Besides, I also chat with people, accept their friend requests so on an average, I spend an hour with them.’ As creators’ popularity grows, however, interacting with each fan can quickly become prohibitively time-consuming.

Frugality is also vital to sustainability and success with short-form content, as Anirudh Pandita (2018), co-founder of Pocket Aces, explained: ‘In the short form you are watching for five minutes, having a laugh and sharing it with your friends and going back to what you were doing. That is the method of consumption.’ Pocket Aces is a digital entertainment company that runs three YouTube channels, which produce sketches and web series. Collectively, the three channels have amassed over one million YouTube subscribers. Pandita (2018) was also quick to point out how Pocket Aces deploys meme culture to attract audience attention, ‘Our Content team creates content quickly through memes … we use [memes] as an experiment … does this joke work?’ By strategically posting content at specific times and across specific platforms, the Pocket Aces team can capitalize on the fast-moving format of memes without needing to invest significant time for maximum audience traction. As Pandita further explained, popular memes, sketches and on-screen cast member dynamics are repeated in a broader context through web series. In this way, Pandita and Pocket Aces can minimize risks by recreating successful ideas or jokes with different characters. This kind of strategic use of short-form content illustrates a dynamic approach to testing for popularity and ascertaining the viability of longer format content.

Creators must also be strategic when competing for attention online. They must be cognisant of viewers and create content that can quickly be circulated through different communities. 122

According to Pandita (2018), the first step is to understand how each of these platforms helps to reach viewers and then to devise a multi-platform strategy:

We came in at a time when YouTube had several channels offering diverse content with a strong subscriber base. So, we said, if I put a video up on YouTube, how will I get it to count? How do I get it to be discovered? So, the actual discovery was done on Facebook and not YouTube … We went for Facebook first … And the sharing started getting us the initial virality.

Online creators are not only using a combination of platforms to extend reach but are also prioritizing them depending on the life-cycle of their content or channel. As a platform, Facebook is more conducive to creating communities, whereas YouTube promises remuneration but may limit the prospect for discovery (due to the concentration of content). The creators make the distinction between YouTube and Facebook as they seek to commercialize their practices across these platforms. As observed in previous instances, the digital media economy not only enables a participatory framework (Jenkins, 2008) but also encourages opportunities for self-employment (Ross, 2013) and self-branding (Gandini, 2016), which can be used as a currency for circulation, collaboration and monetization.

Co-founded by six postgraduates with degrees in advertising and public relations and prior experience of four years in a digital agency, ScoopWhoop started as a listicle but has grown into a fully-fledged media company, with funding from venture capital agencies in 2014 and 2016, running three internet publications: ScoopWhoop, the flagship brand; Vagabomb, a women-centric publication; and GazabPost, which specializes in Hindi-language content. It also publishes editorials and videos on social media platforms to maximize its reach. The Chief Strategy Officer of ScoopWhoop, Meghana Bhatt (2018), noted that ScoopWhoop had emerged as a venture to cater to the ‘discerning young audience alienated by Indian television content.’

ScoopWhoop also runs YouTube channels to post audio-visual content. For example, ScoopWhoop (ScoopWhoop, 2014) for short-form fiction comedy and music content (with close to half a million subscribers on YouTube in 2019); Ok tested, where its employees perform quirky, entertaining challenges and tasks (Ok tested, 2017); and ScoopWhoop Unscripted for non-fiction content such as interviews with celebrities, vox-pops and documentaries (ScoopWhoop Unscripted, 2016). Both ScoopWhoop Unscripted and Ok tested to have a modest subscriber base of over 100,000 subscribers. In 2015, ScoopWhoop also 123

produced a successful seven-part web series fiction comedy on YouTube titled Baked (Baked, 2015), a story of three university graduates who launch a food delivery start-up; it was followed in 2016 by a sequel (Baked, 2016), averaging a million views for both the series. In many ways, ScoopWhoop’s media practices are like the global media and entertainment company Buzzfeed, which focuses on producing videos and articles on contemporary issues (Tandoc Jr, 2018). Apart from YouTube, ScoopWhoop also creates content through multiple Facebook and Instagram channels. Since ScoopWhoop’s profits are advertiser-driven, and its existence is dependent on driving the audience’s attention to its social media assets, the company’s social media strategy could be the key to understand the platform-specific audience traits. Bhatt (2018) asserts that ScoopWhoop uses YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to reach its audience:

Facebook is used to build a brand and engagement as it has the maximum reach. Further, our page analytics suggest that Facebook has a low-retention span, and therefore the focus is more on creating low-cost shareable content (memes, articles, sketches). On the contrary, as the YouTube audience prefers ‘binge- watching,’ and therefore, the production quality is higher.

Similarly, there are many ways in which the perceived social media affordances feed into the distribution strategies of online media companies. TVF’s sister vertical, Girliyapa, which specializes in content for women, followed a unique content sharing strategy to reach its digital audience while dealing with the plethora of social media platforms. Girliyapa head Tracy D’Souza (2018), elaborating on the behavioral traits of medium-specific digital audiences, shared the vertical’s content strategy:

We have the main content for YouTube and then some small sketches that go on Facebook, Instagram and even Twitter. It helps us to increase the reach of our main original content and helps in engaging with the audience. We primarily post on Facebook to increase the reach of our content. Users of Facebook go to connect with their friends, and while at it, they bump into the content on the platform.

As they navigate the uncertainties surrounding the economic outcome of social media, the creators’ understanding of the platform and knowledge of platform-specific audience enables them to produce different values from their usage of each social media platform (Scolere et al., 2018). Rather than using each of these platforms simply as distribution models, their use is 124 determined by their perceived prime value: Facebook for community building and YouTube for monetizing. Ultimately, the brands are attracted to the Facebook community base and are used as proof of popularity with the audience to attract more revenue. By applying these learnings, the content creators can sustain, engage and multiply their audiences, attracting advertisers and multimedia platforms for collaboration in the process. At the same time, Scolere (2019) concluded from her study of graphic design professionals and their use of social media that platform-specific self-branding means online content creators have to continually modify their creations in consonance with platform affordances.

Social media also provide more avenues for additional revenue through creative labor. The five stand-up comedians I interviewed each mentioned the additional writing work they do to supplement their incomes. One interviewee pointed to the promisingly broad digital market for professional comedy writers. Comedians may also connect with a broader audience of organizations through their body of digital work, as Aditi Mittal (2017) elaborated:

I am spending more time thinking [of] ways to translate online, which was not the case earlier. Now, I am thinking of ways to put this [content] in the form of a tweet or a picture, or a video, in a freer direction.

Translating content, writing copy and cross-platform integration offer opportunities for more revenue streams, but at the cost of dividing creators’ attention and devouring time that could otherwise be spent on other professional work. The second theme developed through interviewees’ repeated insistence that they were not ‘just YouTubers’ focuses on the professional identity of these creators.

Professional Identity

In addition to strategic approaches to their labor, the independent content creators expressed a desire to cultivate a specific professional identity. Interviewees again pointed to the utility of digital platforms when it came to building their online identities because, as Aditi Mittal (2017) explained, ‘social identity is a new currency.’ Many of our interviewees were adamant that ‘online content creator’ was not how they identified themselves. As Sorabh Pant (2017) emphasized, ‘I describe myself as a comedian. The rest of it is all just other stuff.’ Brahma Raval, who primarily produces video content, acknowledged his dual role as a digital content creator as well as a filmmaker. Tanya Chamoli (2017) acknowledged that content creation was 125 a job – albeit not her primary job: ‘I am a choreographer, performer and freelancer. YouTube is my part-time job.’ Independent creators indicated that online content was just ‘other stuff’ that they could use as a calling card for other creative work. Specific creators I interviewed wanted audiences to sample their work via social media to encourage further exploration of their more substantial bodies of work. These findings challenge Cunningham and Craig’s (2019) assertion that social media represent a repository for nonlinear open sharing of amateur content creation while digital media (portals) remain the hub for professionally generated content.

As an example of how creators used their online content to popularise their other work, Tanya Chamoli (2017) remarked, ‘I am not here to [make] money, but rather to showcase my art.’ Showcasing art does, in many cases, lead to potentially lucrative opportunities, as demonstrated by Aditi Mittal, who released a Netflix comedy special in 2017. She explained, ‘I have got tons of work because of the stuff that I have put online … it is kind of a CV, a glorified video CV, on things that I have been doing for the past seven years.’ Comedian Atul Khatri (2017) described these digital calling cards as tools to reach out and boost ticket sales for his live comedy shows. Brahma Raval (2017), who creates regional Gujarati content, reflected that streaming services were a launching pad for his broader professional aspirations: ‘My objective is to produce a film. If I get a good budget, I would definitely like to create a good Gujarati film.’ Another aspect of developing a professional identity is how YouTube and Facebook empower creators to use their personal experiences for storytelling.

Vaibhav Sethia (2018), an ex-architect and a stand-up comedian with 170,113 subscribers on YouTube and 11,446,517 cumulative views from uploading seven stand-up comedy videos as of June 2019, identified YouTube as a platform ‘for reaching a larger audience.’ Sethia uses many social media platforms to reach his audience, specifically ‘YouTube to upload videos of my work. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat to publicize shows and for personal use’; this is akin to Burgess and Green’s (2018, 84) articulation of ‘cross-platform’ strategies of creators. So, while an increase in viewership on YouTube does earn revenue for him, his low uploading count in the last two years shows his dependence on YouTube is for popularity and promotion rather than monetization. Sethia also identifies himself as a ‘stand-up comedian’ rather than a ‘YouTuber,’ crediting YouTube with ‘establishing stand-up [comedy] as a full- time career choice in India.’

Before stand-up comedy, Sethia tried a variety of jobs from architect to assistant director in Bengali film. Eventually realizing his passion for stand-up comedy, Sethia, from Kolkata, 126 began performing stand-up shows in 2012 but struggled for paid gigs as the stand-up comedy scene was not particularly developed, especially in Kolkata. However, as Kay (2018, 15) notes in her study of Indian internet comedy, the advent of YouTube led to a demand for, and the popularity of, stand-up comedy as a form of entertainment. This resulted in a growing number of stand-up comedians who eventually used social media platforms as means to build a fan base, in the hope that some viewers would eventually turn up for their live events. Their social media following was also used as evidence to convince comedy clubs to hire them. Popular stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra noted that, ‘Tickets would not sell if comics were not promoting themselves online’ (Mishra, 2019). Sethia’s popularity on social media platforms also led Amazon Prime to sign him for a stand-up comedy special show, Don’t, in 2018. Online content creators today are becoming increasingly aware of the motivations behind their use of social media, whether it is for self-expression (Livingstone, 2008), promotion or commerce. Chamoli and Sethia’s illustrations also demonstrate the intelligence of the creators in negotiating the capitalistic motives of the social media platforms with regard to materialising their aspirations.

Non-hierarchical Corporate Structures

Another marker of the increasing means to battle precarity is what I term ‘non-hierarchical corporate structures,’ a flatter and a more democratic working culture adopted by online media companies to combat the demand for content to retain social media relevance as well as the unpredictability of success.

As discussed earlier, I operationally define these as ‘non-hierarchical corporate structures,’ which refers to online content creators organizing their activities in ways similar to the ‘legacy media’ corporate structure but differing in media-management practices. Companies such as TVF, AIB and Pocket Aces have grown through content creation on YouTube and are now functioning as fully fledged production houses. Their expertise in social media content creation offers competitive advantages over independent creators in online screen media markets and provides more security to the executives working in these companies.

Associate Creative Director for TVF, Nidhi Bisht (2018), highlights TVF’s non-hierarchical corporate structure, which he terms a ‘creative corporate structure’ deployed to pitch and develop ideas: 127

We have a Creative Corporate Structure. Let us say I have an idea which I think has the potential, the first thing I will do is … bounce it in the room, and there would be like-minded people who think that the idea has the potential. So, as we bounce the idea and ten jokes come up, and we see writers getting excited for this … then we say, yes, something can be done on this …

This distinctly non-hierarchical corporate culture echoes an attempt to decentralize the traditional corporate hierarchy and change how ideas are pitched and developed in the Indian film and TV industries. An open corporate environment that emphasizes sharing ideas from all levels is reflected in the corporate culture of another digital media company, Pocket Aces, as co-founder Anirudh Pandita (2018) noted:

The company is actually based on some of our core beliefs of the culture. So, we always put culture above everything else. You saw the office; it is pretty open. There is no cubicle, so it is a free atmosphere. There is a lot of belief that interdepartmental disciplinary skills will bring out content and ideas.

In highlighting these examples, I argue that the new screen ecology has facilitated the growth of social media content companies that operate with a flatter, more democratic structure compared with the film and television industries. The popularity of original content creations and a nuanced understanding of audiences can also assist companies to function as a traditional production company and pitch their ‘portfolios’ (Scholere, 2019) to portals; this is a strategy practiced by Arré, a digital entertainment content company established by UDigital Content in 2016. Founded by a team of media professionals, Ronnie Screwvala, Ajay Chacko and B Sai Kumar, the company leadership changed hands with Ronnie Screwvala exiting as an investor in place of Sanjay Rai Chaudhari (Bhattacharyya, 2016). In 2016, the company received an undisclosed amount of funding from Enam Holdings, an investment group, to further its business plans and content offerings (Johari, 2016). With a workforce of 50 media professionals, Arré operates across social media verticals such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, while also serving as a producer, marketer and distributor to television and streaming platforms.

Arré’s Vice President, Product and Business Development, Niyati Merchant, shared details about the company’s genre and format-agnostic content strategy. She highlighted how Arré, since its inception in 2016, had produced sketches, web series, documentaries, editorials and podcasts across comedy, thriller, food, travel, and adventure, music segments. Unlike Indian television, which 128

strategizes its content in strict genre terms, these companies have minimal restrictions and can diversify their portfolio better. Arré has also distributed content to several OTT platforms such as Ola Play, Jio, SonyLIV, Yupp TV and TataSky, besides collaborating with Saavn, an audio streaming platform, to create Trial by Error. As of June 2019, it has over 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube (UDigital, 2015) and 1.7 million likes on its Facebook page (UDigital, n.d.).

The popularity of Arré’s content on social media ultimately served as the calling card, as portal Times MX player commissioned Arré’s to produce a popular six-episode web series sitcom on Indian start-up culture, titled Tathastu (‘Curated by Arré,’ 2019). Naturally, its social media library of sketches and web series also shows the ability of its production team to mount short- and long-form narratives. Additionally, Arré’s strong audience metrics of subscribers, views and fan engagement on social media serve as a strong portfolio for engaging in business practices with brands and streaming platforms that are looking to target Indian online users. Figure 5.1 shows one of Arré’s Facebook posts that shows Arré managing Viacom18’s portal, Voot’s social media promotion on Facebook.

Figure 5.1 Arré Facebook post promoting Voot content

While some independent online creators (such as stand-up comedians and vloggers) may view these shifts toward more formalized production as a threat, others see clear benefits. Non- hierarchical corporate structures on social media help launch careers, develop and execute 129

innovative ideas, and deliver high-quality content. Creators use these structures, in conjunction with strategic approaches to labor and carefully crafted professional identities, to take full advantage of the new creative affordances of digital media platforms.

Building a Media Career from Social Media

Earlier studies (Kücklich, 2005; Postigo, 2007) have articulated how video game modders’ online labor practices enabled them to achieve fame on social web platforms. These studies asserted that the video game modders utilized this capital to obtain jobs and open up further possibilities for employment opportunities, which exemplifies the agentic choice afforded to creators. Through the labor practices on social media, a new generation of Indian creators and media entrepreneurs are experiencing the freedom of creative expression, attaining popularity and using it to achieve career aspirations.

Bhuvan Bam, who won Global Entertainer of the Year at Cannes 2019, principally for his YouTube channel BB ki Vines, exemplifies content creators who began their career on social media. BB ki Vines is focused primarily on creating vlogs, sketches and short comedy videos and had over 12 million subscribers (Bam, 2016) as of June 2019. While discussing his online creative work in an interview, Bam described practicing as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist before becoming a YouTuber, ‘After my 12th boards (final exams), a guy offered me to sing in a restaurant. Till my second year of college, I used to perform at a Delhi restaurant. Then I started writing my own songs.’ (Arora, 2016). In this manner, Bam, who was principally a musician, could create a popular satirical channel by conjuring multiple imaginary narratives laced with humor. The ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess, 2006) on the internet is a result of the social media affordances that empower creators to engage in multiple genres of entertainment and forge their career trajectories, as evidenced by Bam’s social media performance as an actor, vlogger, writer and editor.

While one cannot ignore the struggle and precarious creativity that most social media creators undergo in their everyday work practices, it is hard to imagine this kind of autonomy in traditional media. Furthermore, the high-risk investment in the production culture often dissuades producers from taking risks in their storytelling. In comparison, besides welcoming newcomers, social media also offers the freedom to explore multiple talents. Most of my interviewers who have previously worked on television productions as actors and writers expressed their frustration with television’s industrial practices. They argued that the over- 130 reliance on soap opera limited their ability to express themselves creatively. Online creators such as Bam are not afraid to innovate with their roles – Bam has appeared as an actor in multiple web series, commissioned on YouTube channel Happii Fi (owned by television network Sri Adhikari Brothers Television Network Ltd) and TVF (owned by Contagious Online Media Pvt. Ltd) respectively. In late 2018, Bam became the first Indian online content creator to reach 10 million subscribers (Bhattacharya, 2018).

Bam also teamed up with Guneet Monga, a well-known producer of films including The Lunchbox, Gangs of Wasseypur and Masaan, to star in a short film titled Plus Minus (‘Plus Minus,’ 2018). It was written and directed by Jyoti Kapur Das, whose previous short film, Chutney, was also released on YouTube, where it received 125 million views (Largeshort Films, 2016). In Plus Minus, Bam plays the role of a 22-year-old Indian army soldier, which required him to prove a high level of acting – marking a dramatic shift from his previous narratives of satire and humor. The film has received widespread praise from critics and internet audiences alike, receiving 18 million views as of June 2019 (BB ki Vines, 2018).

Das’s prior experience as a media practitioner spans Indian television, film and new media, with him taking on the roles of writer, producer and director during the journey. The acceptance of Das from both the audience and skilled film professionals suggests an opportunity for online creators who are keen to navigate from new media to old media. Bollywood film producers are not shy about investing in an online content creator simply because of the creator’s YouTube origins. On the contrary, by releasing the short film on his YouTube channel, the producers and the director managed to use Bam’s popularity to gather a ready-made audience (Das, 2018). Bam’s case study exemplifies how film professionals trusted his acting prowess based on his portfolio of low-budget vlogs and sketches.

Bam’s popularity among his subscriber base led him to become the brand ambassador for Mivi, an electronics brand that also co-sponsored Chutney. Moreover, the engagement between India’s YouTube sensations and successful film industry professionals for the short film also meant a flurry of articles covering the news about the short film, creating a buzz around the film. It is remarkable to see how YouTubers like Bhuvan Bam build their confidence from such fame and popularity to innovate and scale their productions. At the same time, creators can balance out the tensions between authenticity and commerce (Cunningham and Craig, 2017) as they professionalize their content-creation practices. In 2018, Bam also performed a sketch with mainstream Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan (Bam, 2018), who came to promote his film Zero 131

on Bam’s channel, further strengthening Bam’s popularity as an ‘influencer’ (Abidin, 2015) and Bollywood’s need to include promotions on online content creators’ channels as a part of its film marketing strategy.

The intermingling of digital media labor with film industry professionals is another example of the power dynamics emerging between Bollywood and internet creator culture. The platform economy, therefore, consists of content creators who can use networked technologies to their advantage. Bam’s case study is meant to highlight how a commoner hailing from a middle-class Delhi household, with no connections to the film or television industry, used social media to carve an identity for himself within the media industry landscape. It also exemplifies how earnings from social media are simply not enough to sustain a media career. Building connections with established traditional media circuits can help the creator to navigate the structural tensions that arise out of each medium – social media’s uncertainty and the nepotistic tendencies of traditional media.

Siddharth Aalambayan, Creative Head at Times Internet Ltd, the digital venture of the legacy media company The Times of India, one of the largest media and entertainment groups in India, commented on the seamless nature of online content creators with regard to securing future projects. While discussing the movement of creator labor in the new screen ecology, Alambayan (2017) argued:

It has become a society that lives by the osmosis of creators. Zakir Khan (comedian) can have his own (YouTube) channel, market small snippet videos on Facebook, and appear in AIB (YouTube channel) sketch with ease. Devika Vatsa (actress) can be in a Hewlett Packard advertisement while she is in a Timeliners (TVF vertical) sketch. Shibani Bedi, who works on Times Internet’s social media vertical, iDiva, a women’s lifestyle channel, is seen in a YouTube ad by Horlicks (hot milk drink) because she attained her screen fame on the internet via ScoopWhoop (she was previously working with ScoopWhoop) and then a facelift from iDiva.

In highlighting these examples, Alambayan exemplifies the fluidity and commerciality of vloggers, actors and stand-up comedians with social media presence in negotiating their popularity across multiple media. As Baym (2015, 4) notes, ‘the ability for individuals to communicate and produce mediated content on a mass scale has led to opportunities for fame 132

that were not available outside of the established culture industries before.’ Actor Naveen Kasturia, who has appeared in critically acclaimed Hindi feature films like Shanghai and Sulemaani Keeda, as well as scripted web series on multiple streaming portals (web series) such as TVFPlay and Zee5, noted that he received a lot more offers after the success of TVF web series Pitchers, where he played the role of one of the four protagonists: ‘It changed many things. I also started getting more money on commercials’ (Kasturia, 2018). For online content creators, social media is not so much a destination as a way to further their sustainability and commerciality within the media industries.

However, the constant hustling across mediums is also a key strategy for alleviating risks that arise out of the volatilities of dealing on social media. While social media affordances allow for creator videos to feature on the social media feeds and timelines of subscribers, the lack of transparency and unpredicted changes to the systems act as a deterrent for creators as well as companies who are investing all their time, energy and finances on these platforms to build their brands. At the same time, these platforms are increasingly populated by a range of players who are competing for attention across multiple disciplines, mediums and genres.

In such a scenario, it is difficult for less successful as well as less economically privileged creators to attract attention and practice their craft as a full-time job, as noted by Priyam Ghose (2018), an emerging regional online creator from Kolkata who specializes in creating Bengali language content. Malaby (2006) makes similar findings in his study, where he argues that the online exchange between virtual communities occurs in the form of cultural capital. Malaby’s study of online multiplayer games showed that the digital media economy could not be studied from the perspective of economic capital alone, as the accumulation of content provided more power and agency to the creator as opposed to traditional media industries.

As an example, Indian YouTuber Nikunj Lotia, who creates comedy sketches on his YouTube channel BeYouNick with over three million followers as of June 2019, has evolved into a full- time creator (Lotia, 2014). Hailing from a small city named Dombivali near Mumbai, Lotia – who came from a non-media background and worked as a freelance bartender – began creating videos in 2013 ‘for fun’ (Lotia, 2017). Lotia’s popularity and social media revenue enable him to collaborate with brands and Bollywood celebrities for marketing and promotion activities. As noted by Cunningham and Craig (2019, 16), several creators started on social media as ‘hobbyists with little intention of developing income,’ but over time, the lure of social, cultural and economic rewards through YouTube’s programmatic advertising, fans and Facebook, 133

Instagram and YouTube subscribers have encouraged them to sustain their content-creation practices on social media.

Meanwhile, the low entry barrier has also enabled them to experiment with their business ventures on social media, as I observed in the case of Kopal Khanna, the 27-year-old co- founder of Tape A Tale, who left her well-paying job in Mumbai to start her storytelling venture with a friend. The anxiety around getting stories for her venture, the website for which was designed by her cousin, and the high cost of living led Khanna to take two freelance jobs before the venture found storytellers and an online audience. Khanna’s business revolves around organizing storytelling events based on curated stories received for the live event. Selected stories are recorded and uploaded to YouTube under the same channel name (Khanna, 2017). The event involves selected commoners sharing interesting anecdotes about their life experiences with audiences in a ticketed event. Khanna described how sharing on YouTube has helped Tape A Tale to gain new viewers (online) as well as audiences (offline) for the event.

Khanna’s social media usage suggests that she uses the social media platform to widen the visibility of her venture, which also helps her to pitch to brands for integration opportunities. Further, she elaborated how some of the storytellers had become ‘YouTube sensations’ and had pursued their passion for storytelling by creating their own YouTube channels, with some even leaving their full-time jobs in the process (Khanna, 2018). As of June 2019, Tape A Tale’s YouTube channel has over one million subscribers, with over 56 million views (Khanna, 2017) and over 78,000 likes on its Facebook page (Khanna, n.d.). Khanna and her partner’s multimodal approach of establishing the business beyond the confines of social media helps the company to circumvent social media uncertainties and create economic value, which is further derived from sponsorship, talent representation, and live-event ticket sales. At the same time, the co-production activities of both the Tape A Tale founders and the talent unearthed by the concept have enabled them to sustain as well as enhance opportunities for commercial and cultural rewards.

Entrepreneurial Labor

While interviewing online content creators (n=45) in India, my research findings revealed that the ‘entrepreneurial’ nature of the job allowed online creators an opportunity to build their brand, which eventually paved the way for opportunities to achieve fame and money. For 134 instance, Ankur Dobriyal (2018), Senior Creative Producer at ScoopWhoop, acknowledged that the company was instrumental in providing exposure for his singing talent:

I joined the ScoopWhoop team as a Postproduction Supervisor. One fine day, the Company CEO got to know about my singing and allowed me to be a part of the ScoopWhoop Café (singing cover songs) series on YouTube. I, along with a few other people, created a video with zero budget, shooting with a mobile camera and with no expectations in terms of the response of the audience, but that video got over a million hits within an hour from its upload on the channel.

Having worked only in post-production teams in small companies in the past, Dobriyal attributed his popularity on YouTube to getting opportunities that transcended social media. He revealed that he had ‘begun to get calls from various event managers and talent managers for collaborations and live performances.’ As online content creators continue to struggle with the social media algorithms and metrics, commonly referred to as ‘black box’ (see Pasquale, 2015), they are constantly adopting new creative and cost-effective measures to produce content that attracts a majority of views. One of the ways to achieve this is by employing creators who can do multiple tasks within the media-creation process, such as writing, acting and editing. Nidhi Bisht (2019), Creative Director of TVF, argued that TVF encouraged a multi-tasking environment where ‘the one who wrote also had the leverage to act or direct.’ However, creators confessed that these prudent measures afforded them greater agency, which increased their overall involvement in and passion for their work. Creators also see multi-tasking as improving online visibility and creating more chances of securing work on portals and from Bollywood.

Dhruv Sehgal, a senior content creator of Pocket Aces, a digital media company that specializes in creating content on social media, argued that ‘writing and acting for Dice Media (YouTube verticals) led him to receive several offers from media companies.’ Multi-tasking is also a regular occurrence for online content creators who prefer to stay behind the camera. Sehgal also recalled his impromptu acting debut: ‘We were making a video for Dice Media [Pocket Aces’ long-form content YouTube channel], and one of the actors did not turn up, and hence I was asked to do the role instead’ (Sehgal, 2018). The ability of firms to take risks and engage their workforce on-screen is precarious, emancipatory and cost-efficient. Shifting roles allows creators to attend to audience preferences and capitalize on unexpected opportunities for creative labor. Sehgal, a Delhi-based media graduate, shifted to Mumbai to take up his first job 135

as one of the original employees of Pocket Aces in 2016. Having worked earlier on a documentary and short film as an associate director and actor, respectively, the founders encouraged Sehgal to explore writing.

Sehgal developed a show for Pocket Aces based on his own life experiences, called A Delhi Boy, Now Living in Mumbai. A couple of Sehgal’s sketches on YouTube, where he acted alongside Mithila Parkar, went viral. However, his biggest writing/acting success came in the form of Little Things (2016)—a five-episode web series on Pocket Aces’ YouTube vertical Dice Media, which was a sensation among Indian digital audiences, grossing an average of approximately eight million views (average viewership of all shows). Little Things loosely follows the everyday life of a couple living in Mumbai. As discussed in chapter 4, stories like these reflect the aesthetics of online content as a storyteller’s medium. Sehgal’s approach to online content as a storyteller’s medium illustrates creators’ liberty to express their identities realistically online.

The success of Little Things is not limited to YouTube alone. Its second season was acquired by Netflix (Bhattacharya, 2018), and the Little Things book was contracted to be published by Penguin Random Book House India (Vikas, 2018). The streaming of the series on Netflix (Little Things, 2018) offered Sehgal a chance to showcase his talent across 190 countries.

Sehgal’s popularity eventually earned him opportunities for brand endorsements, with Anirudh Pandita, the co-founder of Dice Media, even acknowledging that Sehgal had ‘received an offer for a feature film’ (Pandita, 2018). Pandita’s revelation is not surprising, given that since Little Things, Sehgal’s co-star, Mithila Parkar, has appeared in the Marathi-language feature film Muramba (2017), the Bollywood film Karwaan (2017), and the Netflix feature film Chopsticks (2018) (Sharma, 2019). The ‘multi-tasking’ labor approach of these media companies not only makes their content cost-effective but also rewards the investment in energy and time by employees.

The greater degree of dependence on talent among digital media companies and within the overall media industries helps them to overcome the venture labor critique that Neff (2012) offers in her study of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The varying degrees of success enjoyed by independent content creators and the show Little Things exemplify the power of online content to derive new meanings from identity, help creators cross over to other platforms and reward the individuals involved. 136

Challenging the Domination of the Television and Film Industries

While there has been domination on the part of the conglomerates, the democratic access to media (Jenkins 2006) has also enabled independent creators as well as digital media companies (distinct from legacy, global media, television and film entities) to create content that can compete for online viewer attention alongside established major powers in the digital space, on platforms such as Netflix, Hotstar (Star venture) and Voot (Viacom18 venture). I argue that this coterminous existence is a core dynamic of the Indian new screen ecology. For instance, India’s top YouTube creator, All India Bakchod (AIB), was hired by Hotstar to create a multilingual comedy show entitled, ‘On Air with AIB’ (Sharma, 2017, 1). The strategy of the newly launched VoD service, Hotstar, was to engage millennial audiences and attract them to the portal. Besides leveraging its audiences, AIB was willing to collaborate with Hotstar as it could provide a platform to harness creativity for commercial success. Media businesses invest heavily in marketing content, but it is often the creators’ brands that benefit the most.

As I noted above, avoiding the hierarchic structure of the Bollywood industry is a benefit of adopting non-hierarchical corporate structures. Companies such as TVF and Pocket Aces challenge the Bollywood and television industry’s business culture through their content and organizational culture. There is an element of trust and confidence that firms like Pocket Aces and TVF afford their employees, which my interviewees explain is rooted in start-up culture. It distinguishes the production culture of the new screen ecology, as Anirudh Pandita (2018) describes: ‘[Television executives] are not courageous enough to let young people make content. That is the structural difference between them and us … We dare to hand over the company to a young person and say, ‘go, run this, go make the content.’ Employees at all levels are given greater latitude to engage in tasks, pitch new ideas and help keep pace with rapidly moving online culture.

Turning from the work culture to the creative content, many of my interviewees noted that, despite their varying levels of fame and success, they still had to fight for visibility in the shadow of Bollywood. A principal means of cutting through the noise is to avoid Bollywood- style content altogether. The established conventions of Bollywood film culture, designed for mass commercial appeal, appear ‘rigid’ and ‘reductive’ to creators working in the digital space (Mittal, 2017). According to Aditi Mittal, Bollywood movies fall short in nuances and subtle presentation, giving independent creators a chance to fill gaps with innovative, niche and sometimes risky approaches to content and storytelling. Online content creators can exploit 137

audience fatigue with Bollywood’s famously highly production values and predictable storylines, as Dhruv Sehgal comments: ‘Hardly anyone is interested in watching a car flying. People are more interested in knowing about the show story, the characters and their interplay’ (Sehgal, 2018). Online content creators operate on a shoestring budget compared with any given Bollywood production, yet the success of online content – such as the above example of Little Things – speaks volumes to the value of putting a strong story ahead of production values.

Even though the Bollywood stars are still ‘at a god kind of level’ in the eyes of their devoted fans (Khatri, 2017), dedicated fan bases are steadily growing for many independent and collective digital content creators. Sorabh Pant attributes this to a shift in media consumption, as a younger generation flocks to the internet:

I think consumption patterns are changing, and young people are changing with it. And I do not know if it is going to be on the same scale, but it is going to be pretty close. Like I have seen the kind of insanity that goes down whenever some big YouTube star is touring everywhere’ (Pant, 2017).

Bollywood and its massive audience are certainly not going anywhere, but our interviewees exemplify how online creators can survive and thrive in India – whether independently, together as non-hierarchical corporate companies or production houses, or through partnerships with platforms/portals.

Future Challenges

While the previous sections focused on the agency of creators in traversing new avenues to create new forms and business practices, my cohort pointed to two ongoing challenges that continue to plague the new screen ecology in India: censorship and gender inequality.

Censorship

Despite the success stories described above, our interviewees were wary of the persistent spectre of censorship in India. Freedom House (2017, 1) ranks India as having a ‘partly free’ internet, pointing to several instances where the Indian government has impinged upon or restricted internet freedom. The report details instances of the government temporarily suspending mobile networks, enacting laws that enable government surveillance of users and 138

making arrests in connection with content shared online. As one interviewee put it, ‘You have to toe the line a little bit more in India than you would ordinarily in the West’ (Pant, 2017).

Online creators in India are in a unique position regarding government censorship, compared with their film or TV counterparts. Despite the instances of censorship identified by Freedom House, Indian law dictates that the internet is a censorship-free medium. Films in India must be certified by the Censor Board of Film Certification (CBFC), and television content is subject to censorship by the Broadcasting Content Complaints Council (BCCC), set up by the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF 2018).

The principle of the uncensored web in India may be short-lived, however, as the Bombay High Court recently sought advice from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Union Ministry of Electronics and Technology against public interest litigation (PIL) filed over ‘obscene and vulgar’ representation in content being streamed on the Netflix and AltBalaji portals (Mangure, 2018, 1). The court’s decision will have far-reaching effects on online content creators, as the PIL seeks to set up a pre-screening committee for the content produced on streaming services. Such examples are just a few of the Indian government’s strategies to build consensus for the development of new policies for online content regulation, the ramifications of which may lead digital content creators to fall in line with the Indian film and television industries. It is worth noting that none of my interviewees mentioned any specific examples of having to take down content or pay fines as a result of the Indian government’s censorship laws.

These developments have also triggered concerns about the relatively lawless ambit under which these platforms and portals operate compared with the film and television industry. However, equally concerning is the government’s silence on right-wing forces that are using coercive means to threaten Netflix. In September 2019, the state of Maharashtra’s regional party, Shiv Sena, filed a police complaint against Netflix for ‘defaming the country’ through its various shows, such as Sacred Games, Leila, Ghoul and Patriot Act (‘Complaint against Netflix,’ 2019). With growing calls for censorship from right-wing outfits such as Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (National Self-Workers, or RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (Worldwide Hindu Foundation, or VHP), the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has invited representation from streaming platforms and legal experts to figure out ways to regulate online content (Malhotra, 2019). 139

This development comes against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s notice to the Indian Government in May 2018 to initiate regulations of platforms and portals (Malhotra, 2019). Subsequently, the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) developed a code of best industry practices for online self-regulatory content; it was signed by major streaming platforms such as Hotstar, Netflix and Jio (Chatterjee, 2019). The practices discussed in the code included prevention from exhibiting content that is malicious to the nation state’s national interests, deliberately harms religious sentiments, represents children in sexual acts and showcases content that is banned by the Indian courts of justice (Singh, 2019).

Notable practices mentioned in the code include categorizing content on the basis of age, as well as classifying it into distinct viewing categories with content descriptors indicating the nature of the content (Singh, 2019). The code also proposes a complaints redressal system that addresses user complaints while acknowledging intervention from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in cases where the government receives complaints directly or seeks reports on complaints handling. On the other hand, the government’s silence on the advances made by right-wing extremist forces in enforcing censorship has raised serious concerns among netizens and industry-insiders regarding the medium’s ability to encourage freedom of expression and foster depictions of complex social issues – especially in a country such as India, where the platforms and portals serve as an alternative to the closely scrutinized film and television medium (Rao, 2019).

While studying the effects of networked media on Indian online creator culture, Kumar (2015) highlights the extensive use of parody and satire to circulate social and political commentaries to challenge the existing structural inequalities that exist in India. Kumar argues that the subversive forms of humor and relative ease of diffusion on the internet succeed in challenging the power dynamics and hegemonic narratives of dominant forces. Kay (2018) points out that new creators and newer forms of comedy content are emerging on the internet to unpack complex issues pertaining to identity, representation and nation. There is a significant rise in ‘millennial India,’ characterized by the generation born with the internet and emanating from different classes, regions and backgrounds, who are using digital media to voice their political concerns (Punathambekar and Mohan, 2019). These works continue to remind us about the significance of censorship-free digital culture, formed by the concatenation of infrastructures, platforms and publics, in remediating relationships between the nation-state and the public. 140

Keeping aside the question of nation-state control, one interviewee pointed to cases in which she self-imposed censorship to avoid cultural taboos or controversial topics. Aditi Mittal (2017) recounted instances when she was wary of telling jokes that might portray her family or parents negatively, as well as attract an outpouring of the kinds of negative and abusive comments that were posted to a video in which she joked about feminine hygiene products. In both cases, her material would not be removed for contravening any censorship laws, but it would still be cut to avoid toxic audience backlash: ‘You will receive death threats to say what is wrong with you, so you have to be very careful’ (Mittal, 2017). This leads to the second critical challenge facing the Indian new screen ecology: gender inequality.

Gender Inequality

Aditi Mittal (2017) asserts that ‘Most trending content right now is just misogynistic bullshit … and I have no idea what the shit is that, but still, it is trending.’ In her view, the internet in India consists largely of boys and young men, which explains why sexist content performs so strongly while female creators are frequently disparaged and attacked online. Aditi Mittal uses her content and comedy in an attempt to address a highly under-served population of Indian women. Mittal’s assertion highlights the struggle of female content creators working as ‘aspirational laborers,’ characterized as those who produce ‘authentic’ content built on relationships and entrepreneurship, yet receive disproportionate compensation while also conforming to gender stereotypes and social inequality in the online media industry (Duffy and Hund, 2015, 9).

Sexism online is not unique to India; however, cultural taboos (women perceived as a burden for the family) and norms (patriarchy) have prevented messages of gender equality and empowerment from entering the mainstream until recently. According to Kay (2018, 37), ‘Internet comedy has come to be a social imperative by a generation of Indians, which speaks to a wider project of challenging Bollywood and the emerging discourses around gender, discrimination, politics and the media as pressing and pertinent.’ Aditi Mittal’s comments reaffirm this important point, but other interviewees did not speak to this issue. As I discuss below, the #MeToo movement in India laid bare the implications of this pervasive gender inequality and destroyed the businesses and careers of several online media practitioners. 141

The #MeToo movement and India’s NSE

Arguably, the biggest recent impact on the Indian new screen ecology has been made by the #MeToo movement. While exploring the gender dynamics on new media was not the central point of inquiry of my thesis, and the fieldwork in India was conducted before the advent of the #MeToo movement, there were several hints within the industrial practices and constructed media texts on the digital media, as well the experiences of women media practitioners, that can help us to understand how some of the most successful media companies specializing in digital media were impacted by allegations of sexual abuse – with some even shutting down.

Mallika Dua, who rose to fame from her internet-distributed television appearances as a vlogger, actor and writer, accused talent agency Only Much Louder (OML) of under- negotiating her deal with Star TV for the comedy show The Great Indian Laughter Challenge. Dua argued that her male counterpart Zakir Khan, also managed by OML, was paid twice the amount that she was (‘Mallika Dua Says Zakir Khan,’ 2018). In another interview, Dua lamented the fact that women comedians in India are often identified by their gender as ‘female stand-up comedians,’ while also pointing out the deep-rooted gender disparity and pay structure across the Indian media industry landscape (‘I have never evaluated myself,’ 2018).

Providing further evidence for this claim, ex-Buzzfeed video producer Sumedh Natu and stand- up comedian Aayushi Jagad created a YouTube video highlighting systematic under- representation of female characters by popular YouTube creator team All India Bakchod (AIB) (Kanchwala, 2018), who has been eulogized elsewhere for their strong stand on ‘women’s rights’ (Kay, 2018; Pande, 2018). Natu and Jagad’s (2017) textual analysis of previous AIB videos demonstrated how, even in the fewer roles that were offered to women, they were merely utilized as ‘feminists or plot devices’ (Natu and Jagad, 2017). They claimed that AIB only used women in videos as objects to maintain the image of ‘feminist creators’ within their social networks. However, the systemic exclusion of women is not restricted to local practices, as even global media platforms such as Amazon Prime, with their Western and seemingly progressive ideals, have been accused of propagating an identical philosophy.

In 2017, film critic Anupama Chopra ironically invited five male comedians and just one female comedian to discuss prevalent sexism within the Indian comedy circuit for her YouTube channel Film Companion against the backdrop of Amazon Prime’s signing of only male stand- up comedians as a part of their India launch (Manral, 2017). To add to the irony, when Chopra 142

asked whether there was an inherent ‘bro-culture’ within the comedy industry, all the male comedians emphatically denied it in unison, thereby conveniently forgetting Aditi Mittal’s presence. In another YouTube podcast on Indian comedian Daniel Fernandes’s channel, comedian Karunesh Talwar observed how deep-rooted the ‘bro-code’ culture was:

Male comics do not call out others for their shitty, ridiculous, questionable things … for perpetuating negative stereotypes in their material. It is an inside community thing where we’re scared, to be honest with each other. You get ostracized if you call out people in this circuit. (‘As spoken in Fernandes,’ 2017)

The various endemic issues concerning women on internet television within the comedy genre are emblematic of a broader gender politics at play in the Indian media-entertainment landscape. The roots of such notions are often seeded at the educational level, as was highlighted by actress Rasika Dugal.

Dugal’s disturbing experience at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), an apex film school (‘Entertainment education report,’ 2018), provides an informative insight into how the culture of how toxic masculinity propagated within media industries is also a result of systemized gender discrimination practices in reputed media institutions. Duggal’s filmography cuts across mediums as well as platforms, such as Manto, Qissa (Bollywood), Powder (television show), Permanent Roommates (YouTube), Mirzapur (Amazon Prime) and the recently released Delhi Crime (Netflix). While discussing the pervading sexist environment within FTII, Dugal observed:

Even though a greater number of women had applied for specialization in [FTII’s] acting course, only five girls and 15 boys were selected for the same. I find it really shocking how, in every field, this ratio is skewed. Unknowingly, we are fighting so many battles, and I was not even aware that the situation was becoming difficult. That is the problem with gender discrimination: it is so well- embedded within us that we are not even aware that we are dealing with something like this. (Dugal, 2018)

Dugal’s experience demonstrates how deeply rooted and culturally embedded these issues are – and for some, they begin even before they get their first work. Indrani Biswas, the creator of YouTube comedy channel Wonder Munnai and winner of YouTube NextUp 2018, casually 143

remarked that she did not find any female creators on YouTube in Kolkata when she started making videos (Biswas, 2018). At the same time, these issues seem universal, given that previous studies (Allen, 2013; Gill, 2002) have called out the stark gender discrimination that exists in the cultural industries regarding payment and quality of jobs. Burgess and Green’s (2018) seminal scholarship on YouTube articulates how most of the top 30 homegrown YouTube channels belong to male talent (Burgess and Green, 2018, 90). Despite the preliminary evidence promoting digital media as a safe space for the empowerment of alternative voices (Cunningham and Craig, 2019, 23), female creators continue to struggle for compensation as well as screen space, compared with their male counterparts.

The fieldwork for the thesis was conducted before the advent of the #MeToo movement in India, which began with Bollywood actress Tanushree Dutta’s accusation of inappropriate conduct against actor Nana Patekar on the sets of the film Horn ‘Ok’ Pleassss (2008) (Singh and Kumar, 2019, 13). My findings demonstrate that the origins of the #MeToo incidents may be a result of deep-rooted patriarchy in the cultural industries. The refusal of media practitioners to move beyond their parochial patriarchal mindsets, unfortunately, positions the media industry as a site in need of critical reflection that goes beyond the realms of market dynamics. My focus on the new screen ecology is only meant to highlight its naked hypocrisy. In projecting itself as a site of transformation, the new screen ecology is just reproducing the same inequalities within the work culture that it is perceived to be addressing (Herman and McChesney, 2003).

The aftermath of the #MeToo movement in India saw several new screen ecology practitioners suffer losses of business as well as respect from industry insiders and audiences alike. For instance, stand-up comedian Utsav Chakraborty, who was working with AIB, was accused by stand-up comedian Mahima Kukreja of sending inappropriate photos of his private body parts. When Kukreja confided in one of the co-founders of AIB, Tanmay Bhatt, the situation was simply ignored, and AIB continued working with Chakraborty (Pathak, 2019). A few days later, another of AIB’s co-founders, Gursimran Khamba, was accused of sexual harassment by an unidentified woman (Sharma, 2019).

AIB’s reputation among advertisers, brands and producers was severely affected, with clarifications issued and inquiries initiated against these cases – in the end, Tanmay Bhatt and Gursimran Khamba both resigned. Finally, on 22 May 2019 – eight months after the accusations initially surfaced – AIB decided to shut down its operations with immediate effect 144

(Ramnani, 2019). The severity of the movement had a tremendous effect on its relationship with its streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime, Hotstar and Netflix, which pulled the plug on their partnership. Prominent among them was the cancellation of AIB’s US$4 million financed debut indie feature film Chintu ka Birthday (Chintu’s Birthday), which was to be acquired directly by Netflix (Pathak, 2019).

AIB’s talent agency, OML, whose distinct industrial practices as a producer and talent agent are discussed in chapter 7, was caught up in a similar storm for failing to address Chakraborty’s act (AIB and OML share office space in Parel, Mumbai) as well as failing to address its own toxic culture. On 1 November 2018, popular culture magazine The Caravan broke a story about the rampant sexual harassment practices that had been normalized at OML since 2013, using interviews with previous and a few current OML women employees (Kanga, Kappal and Sharma, 2018). The article not only exposed the various accounts of sexual misbehavior committed by OML’s male employees (including its co-founder, Vijay Nair) but also highlighted the loopholes of the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) that was set up to address these concerns.

While OML did not suffer from the same commercial and socio-cultural implications as AIB, the imminent NH7 Weekender Festival, an international independent music festival that OML organized every year, was affected in 2018, with music band Azaadi Records pulling out in protest (‘#MeToo: Azadi Records pulls out of NH7 Weekender,’ 2018). For its part, OML released a media statement emphatically denying the nature of the investigation conducted, while also revealing that Vijay Nair had already left the organization before allegations against him surfaced and stating categorically that these incidents were never put forth before the ICC (‘Only Much Louder responds to #MeToo allegations,’ 2018). Thus, while OML is widely and rightly recognized for its role in mainstreaming stand-up comedy and the careers of stand-up comedians as well as independent musicians, its inability to adhere to the safe working space for women and perpetuating gender bias will remain its biggest fallacy for years to come. Alongside OML and AIB, multiple women accused talent management agency Kwan’s co- founder Anirban Blah of operating a ‘casting couch’; Blah was subsequently fired (Rosario, 2018). Kwan, whose multimedia talent management and industrial practices are discussed in chapter 7, faced similar flak from industry insiders as Blah went into depression and attempted suicide (Thakur, 2018). 145

Whereas Bollywood is accused of ‘rehabilitating all the men accused of sexual misconduct’ (Pathak, 2019), the fact that the accused digital media practitioners have faced the strongest backlash through a loss of social, cultural and commercial capital, compared with the film industry practitioners, suggests that the digital media business enterprises and creators are much more conscious of their moral and ethical practices – even if commercial reasons drive the motivation. By commercial reasons, I refer to the intrinsic link between commercial and social capital whereby the fall in social capital leads to loss in subscribers, advertisers and interests from media producers. The intense connection derived between the audience and creator- interaction on social media, as driven by facilitation of real-time live-streaming, comments, shares, likes and dislikes, acts as a double-edged sword whereby an unethical creator practice directly affects the creator’s subscribers and advertisers, leading to loss of revenue.

Conclusion

Precarious creativity within NSE contexts promotes equality in opportunity and foster freedom of expression for creators looking to pursue a career in the media; however, it does not address questions of safe and secure working conditions. It is necessary to challenge existing power structures within the media industries and their gatekeeping practices while accepting the limitations of digital media in offering an ever-inclusive space for progressive cultural politics. Precarious creativity thus assumes ambivalence, offering grounds for linguistic and cultural diversity (see chapter 6) but also denying those who do not conform to a capitalistic logic.

The purpose of this chapter has not been to valorize the NSE; rather, it should be viewed as an attempt to highlight how distinct kinds of online creators derive value on social media through their sense-making as they deal with precarious creativity. Online content creators – both as individuals and companies – can generate value for themselves on social media and use it as a currency to negotiate the Indian media industries. For the few individuals and firms able to succeed on social media platforms, the success eventually propels the gatekeepers of traditional media and portals to reward them with opportunities for creative expression and monetary compensation while helping them to stay in the online content business. Some online content creators are also organizing themselves to function as digital entertainment companies, professionalizing by creating diverse kinds of content for internet audiences. These companies have been able to secure funding from venture capitalists by highlighting their value propositions. 146

Because the economic and social transactions within the traditional media are unapproachable to the newcomers, despite offering value propositions, social media have been able to create a perception of a more equitable site for creating content as well as for reaching the audience. That social media creator does not have to deal with gatekeepers before creation and can create content that is true to their perceptions also propagate a sense of belief that the inequities of traditional media are dealt with, or at least lessened to a certain extent, by creating on and not for platforms. This belief is strengthened by working on more individualistic motives entrenched within the capitalist logic. Concerns regarding the sustainability of creators performing well on social media can only be assessed by conducting a longitudinal study of their careers.

At the same time, it is important to remember that social media platforms, in attending to the ideology of ‘free marketplace,’ end up producing the same concerns regarding labor productivity and precarity as traditional media (Herman and McChesney, 2003). The advent of technology propagates and reifies capitalist ideologies that only benefit select creators and rationalize ‘inegalitarian’ relationships based on popularity, consistency and volatile algorithmic recommendations that benefit one form of content or one creator over another.

In the next chapter, I focus on the three key aspects of this ecology by first outlining the unprecedented growth of regional online content creators and their influence in shaping platform/portal content strategies and then examining the looming challenges that are affecting this ecosystem. Finally, I look at the emergence of new facets of celebrity and fandom practices arising from the popularity of regional creators who are defying the otherwise dominant paradigm of popularity afforded to film and television personalities.

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Chapter 6 Regional and Localizing Online Content Practices

In this chapter, I build on the theme of localization to foreground the emergence of regional online creators in India’s NSE. I argue that Indian audiences’ increasing desire to consume online content in their native language has led to more demands for ‘regional’ content, whereby streaming platforms and online creators are increasingly investing in ‘non-Hindi’ and ‘non- English’ language content to cater to India’s linguistically and culturally diverse population.

Building on India’s region-specific context in chapters 1 and 2, it is pertinent to note that India is the fourth most linguistically diverse country in the world (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). India uses more than 104 languages for broadcasting on the radio, 87 for the print medium, 67 languages for primary school syllabuses and another 104 languages in the adult learning curriculums (Mohanty, 2010). The prevalent cultural diversity and the region-specific heterogeneity of India is another compelling evidence of the fact that content in one language cannot be the basis for pan Indian address.

Given the complexity of India’s multilingual diversity, catering to native Indian languages is a critical step in NSE localization practices in order to appeal to a larger Indian audience, as was readily conceded in chapter 3 in interviews with the executives of Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Prime and Spuul. I draw attention to the fact that even within India, on average, there is only a 36 percent chance that two Indians can communicate with each other (Kawoosa, 2018). India’s population is so diverse that even Indians from within different regions would find it difficult to speak through one common language. In this chapter, I focus on the commissioning/facilitating of regional content strategies of platforms/portals and production practices of regional creators.

By adopting a multi-scalar CMIS approach (Herbert et al., 2020), I show how the unprecedented creation of regional online content on YouTube since 2017 (KPMG, 2018) has led the NSE to focus on localization strategies marked by three practices: the mobilization of popular regional social media creators by platforms and portals; the emergence of language- specific portals (Hoichoi and Addatimes, as introduced in chapter 3); and the commissioning of regional content that has a ‘local,’ ‘transnational’ and ‘global appeal.’ Through a primary focus on online content-creation practices in the Bengali and Marathi languages, the chapter explores 148 their ‘local,’ ‘regional,’ ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ appeal and subsequent blurring of boundaries between ‘regionalization’ and ‘localization.’

The focus on Marathi and Bengali language content creation practices is a significant intervention in that it departs from the previous scholarship that has either focussed on South Indian languages (see Mohan and Punathambekar, 2019, Srinivas et al., 2018) or upon language (see Tripathy, 2013, 2017; Kumar, 2014 on Bhojpuri language content) that have lacked State formation. Moreover, I do not suggest in this thesis that regional content on Youtube never existed before 2017. Previous studies (Punathambekar, 2008: Srinivas et al., 2018) have articulated the participatory culture of online media in mobilizing the excesses of regional cinema, whether it be through content or through creators. Punathambekar (2008) highlights the participatory culture of musician A.R.Rahman’s fans on various online spaces to show how the Internet serves as a site of sociality for sustaining fan culture. Following Punathambekar (2008), Srinivas et al. (2018) trace the migration of big-budget Tamil and Telugu films from single-screen cinemas to Youtube. In particular, Srinivas et al. (2018, 246) show how regional blockbusters are dubbed in Hindi and Bhojpuri languages to argue ‘the decoupling of regional cinema from both language as well as location of production’ and as means to expand the regional audience base to include Hindi and Bhojpuri speaking audience.

My focus, instead, is on the active creator mobilization strategies of YouTube and Facebook upon realization of the role that regional online creators can play in expanding social media consumption practices beyond states and nations. Moreover, the focus on original content and native social media creators is critical since these sites reluctantly serve as spaces for exhibiting pirated and copyright-infringing content. By banking on the success and entrepreneurial abilities of native regional creators, social media platforms are able to reduce their dependency on aggregated content and project themselves as an aspirational hub for developing ‘homegrown’ creators.

As discussed in chapters 3 and 4, the original content commissioning practices of the NSE are distinct from those of the television industry. Furthermore, as discussed in chapter 4, the everyday practices of the online creators are distinct from those of the film and television industries. As I will show, the relatively ‘seamless’ trans-border flow of regional content due to the cultural politics of select languages (such as Hindi, Bengali and Marathi) and the technology also help the NSE to expand its value propositions beyond one country and to sustain its business. Nevertheless, there are inherent limitations to this study as over 121 149

languages are spoken in India, so more research is needed to examine the impact of other languages on the sustainability of regional creators in India’s NSE.

As discussed in chapter 1, the number of local and global streaming platforms/portals in the marketplace is also due to the fact that India has the world’s cheapest data prices, with a gigabyte of mobile data costing US$0.26, compared to a global average of US$8.53 (Roy, 2019). This has also amplified the possibility of the economic viability of accessing the internet across different strata of Indian society. The Boston Consulting Group report predicted an increase in demand for regional content spurred by the penetration of the internet beyond the metropolitan cities (Laghate, 2018). Mark Lefkowitz, YouTube’s Asia Pacific Head for Creator and Artist Development, acknowledged in an interview that as much as 95 percent of internet consumption on its platform in 2014 was in native Indian languages rather than Hindi and English (Chaturvedi, 2018). Another industry report predicted that approximately 75 percent of new Indian internet users came from rural areas, and 75 percent of these users would prefer to consume content in their native language (EY, 2018). It is widely estimated that the rapid uptake and proliferation of the technology will lead to an increase in the number of Indian- language internet users (non-English) from 275 million in 2018 to 550 million by 2021 (Bidawatka, 2018).

This is not to say that the demand for and circulation of regional online content never existed previously. As early as 1990, the government-initiated the Technology Development of Indian Languages (TDIL) to support the ‘information processing’ of Indian languages on computers (Vikas, 2001). From 1991 until 2001, TDIL launched seven initiatives to facilitate multilingual technology solutions, with an investment of US$3 million. Within the global media landscape, the circulation of pirated copies, licensed and unlicensed DVD and VCDs of regional films at grocery stores and video rental stores constituted an important source of consumption for the Indian South Asian diaspora that had migrated across North America and to the United Kingdom and Australia in 1990 (Athique, 2006). In her study of online content from the Indian diaspora situated in the west, Ananda Mitra (2006, 53) argues that the internet helped in managing ‘the tensions produced by movement and the loss of the sense of familiarity and security related to a ‘place of origin.’ I argue that the online content-creation strategies of creators and platforms are meant to evoke ‘alternative ways of imagining identity, belonging and community’ (Mallapragada, 2006, 225). 150

Regional Content as a Distinctive Feature of the Indian NSE

One of my thesis's fundamental insights has been revealing how platforms and portals expand the scope of regional content through the facilitation or production of original web shows, short films, and full-length films. As I will show in this chapter, YouTube and Facebook have afforded agency to individual regional creators in enabling the creation and circulation of regional content; this is evidenced in chapters 2 and 5, in which I mapped their regional content strategies. The access to viewer data also helps both creators and portals/platforms to accurately trace the content consumption of local and global audiences. YouTube (Ganguly, 2018) and Facebook (Laghate, 2018) have also held creator camps for regional language content creators to expand their content database beyond the Hindi and English languages. The courting of non-English speaking YouTubers offers significant viewership potential, given that YouTube’s Indian audience comprises roughly 230 million regional language users (Krishna, 2018).

While describing the impact of video cassette distribution on the Indian film industry, Athique (2009, 704) notes that:

The ability of VCR technology to match viewers with content, regardless of how dispersed or fragmented an audience was, marked the end of the broadcasting paradigm and the rise of the niche audience as the dominant model of media reception.

Similar to Athique’s (2009) observation about the use of technology to meet viewer demands and address audience fragmentation, I argue that the NSE offers compelling evidence for the benefits of technological innovation in creating social and economic affordances for creators as well as portals/platforms to reach their target audience. Buoyed by the popularity of regional content creation and consumption on YouTube, local and global streaming portals such as Viu, AltBalaji, Netflix, and Amazon Prime have commissioned original content in Indian regional languages (Farooqui, 2018) to cater to the non-Hindi and non-English Indian diaspora. This corresponds directly to the focal argument of the thesis claiming greater interdependence between the Indian platforms and portals as a distinctive aspect of the Indian NSE. The diversification into regional content is part of the technical affordance of the streaming media services, which, unlike television channels, do not have to confine their content to a single language. Further, as I highlight through the cases of language-specific portals such as Hoichoi and Addatimes, and regional online creators Bengali and Marathi, self-limiting online content 151 creation in a specific language is deployed as a strategic move to capitalize on the portal/creator’s expertise, as well as to maintain their niche audience base.

There is a general concern in media and communication studies about the potential media imperialist dynamics of US-originating portals such as Netflix (Jin, 2007), whose catalogs mostly consist of US titles. Jin (2007) demonstrates how local content productions are often overshadowed due to the concentration of US titles. However, this claim applies less in India’s case, given the country’s multilingual diversity and the fact that not every citizen is an English speaker (see chapter 2). Second, as discussed in chapter 3, while Netflix’s content slate is heavily skewed towards English titles, its foray into original content in ‘Hindi’ and ‘Marathi’ languages since its launch in India is an indication of its localization strategy (Mitter, 2018).

Mohan and Punathambekar’s (2018) seminal study on YouTube’s localization practices in India highlights the ‘regional’ and ‘local’ content strategies through an analysis of popular multi-channel network (MCN) Culture Machine’s YouTube Channel, Put Chutney. The authors discuss PutChutney’s use of the ‘Tamil’ language and socio-political commentary in this language, which is specific to the southern Indian peninsula, as a means to connect with the Tamil-speaking diaspora. Further, through close readings of cultural exchanges on YouTube within the southern peninsula as well as India and Pakistan, Kumar, Mohan and Punathambekar (forthcoming) articulate how the cultural lens of ‘region’ offers a stronger description of the way digital media platforms shape online creator culture, time and space. In doing so, the authors argue ‘how new patterns of cultural production and circulation emerge when these technological features militate against established regulatory structures such as the nation-state.’ I build on this literature to further my inquiry on NSE distinctiveness in two ways.

First, I extend the scope of ‘localization’ practices within the NSE by demonstrating the content strategies of local and global platforms/portals such as YouTube, Facebook, AltBalaji, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hoichoi, Addatimes and Spuul. By locating the language-specific content strategies of these platforms and portals, I foreground how these strategies can help the NSE to imagine local and global diasporas. Second, I extend the range of inquiry to the Marathi and Bengali languages, thus reiterating the importance of language-based content in the Indian NSE. Through a focus on original content and everyday labor practices of online creators that are specific to these languages, I investigate the industrial and cultural logics at play in building distinct identity and popularity and catering to ‘spatial communities’ (de 152

Certeau, 1984) that exist beyond the contours of India. Finally, I argue that the regional content strategies deployed by platforms/portals are actually the result of ‘localization’ strategies of creators, who invariably shape the ‘algorithmic and representational logics.’ As I show, the success and popularity of regional creators on YouTube and Facebook beyond India have acted as a motif for the platforms/portals to reimagine the economic potential of creating content in native Indian languages that have transnational and global appeal.

The Indian Regional Landscape

Sidharth Ravindran, Marketing Manager for Netflix, asserted that regional consumption was driven by the ‘increased penetration of television, digital platforms and a large section of the audience taking pride in their roots’ (Ravindran, 2018). Ravindran’s point corresponds with the fact that India is the fourth most linguistically diverse country in the world (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). Its constitution recognizes 22 official languages as ‘Scheduled Languages’ in accordance with the Government of India’s white report on ‘language’ based on the Census of India conducted in 2011 (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2018, 4).

However, there are also 99 unofficial or unscheduled languages, making a total of 121 languages (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2018, 4). The cultural politics become even more complicated, as a total of 19569 ‘mother tongues’ are spoken in India (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2018, 4). The report (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2018, 3) defines ‘mother tongue’ as a ‘language spoken in childhood by the person’s mother to the person. If the mother died in infancy, the language mainly spoken in the person’s home in childhood would be the mother tongue.’ Figure 6.1 shows the scheduled Indian languages in descending order, based on the number of speakers.

As Figure 6.1 shows, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi are among the three most spoken languages in India, followed by Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati. Further, India uses more than 104 languages for radio broadcasts, 87 for the print medium, 67 for primary school syllabuses and another 104 in the adult learning curricula (Mohanty, 2010).

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Figure 6.1 Scheduled Indian languages in descending order based on the speaker’s strength—source: Ministry of Home Affairs (2018, 4).

The prevalent cultural diversity and the region-specific heterogeneity of India provide more compelling evidence that content in one language cannot be the basis for pan-Indian address. Further evidence can also be traced from the populated language-specific film and television industries that are functioning within the Indian media and entertainment landscape. An industry report (KPMG, 2018, 25) states that the regional and Hindi GECs led television advertisement expenditure in 2018. The report also mentioned that there was an overall increase in television viewership for non-Hindi and non-English television viewership channels in 2017 from 2016, as shown in Figure 6.2 (KPMG, 2018, 27). 154

Figure 6.2 Regional language television consumption (% increase 2017–18).

Source: KPMG (2018, 27).

Similarly, within the regional film industry, there has been a steady growth in the audience viewership in regional language films, with the Ernst and Young report citing online ticketing platform Bookmyshow’s results (EY, 2018, 79), claiming an increase in occupancy of 45– 46 percent in theatres for regional films in 2017 compared with 39–40 percent in 2016.

The Blurring of Regionalization and Localization Boundaries

In his study of the television media landscape of India, Athique (2009, 163) notes that liberalization was instrumental in transforming television from ‘Hindi-centric’ government policies to regional players with the potential to cater to ‘national, international and intensely local’ interests. In evidencing the popularity and transnational ability of the Indian television industry, Athique (2009, 163–64) says:

Kolkata-based Bengali broadcasters are seeking bigger audiences in neighbouring Bangladesh, where the majority of Bengali speakers are found. Tamil-language channels reach Tamil-speaking audiences in Sri Lanka and, despite a blanket ban on Indian-produced media in Pakistan, all of the Indian Hindi channels access substantial audiences there via satellite or cable operations. 155

Athique’s commentary is critical, as it highlights the commercial potential of creating ‘regional’ content. However, as the ‘local’ content crosses ‘regional’ boundaries (also see chapter 1, where I discuss Mohan, Kumar and Punathambekar’s (forthcoming) argument on the use of Hindi language in India as well as Pakistan), Athique triggers the complexity that terms such as ‘local’ and ‘regional’ might entail while mapping the content-distribution practices that exist in India. Mohan and Punathambekar (2018, 14) also reflect on the blurring of frameworks that define ‘regionalization’ and ‘localization’ practices, given the community and culture that permeate both.

Consider, for example, the ‘translocal’ presence of the Bengali diaspora, not just within India but also in Bangladesh, Pakistan, the United States, Myanmar and the United Kingdom (Raghuram et al., 2008). While discussing the concept of translocal geography, Brickell and Datta (2011, 3) argue,

Translocality is now widely seen to be a form of ‘grounded transnationalism’ – a space where deterritorialized networks of transnational social relations take shape through migrant agencies. This means that translocality as a form of local–local relations exists primarily within the debates on transnationalism.

The linkage of geographical and cultural imaginations through the platformed economy is a result of the shared commonalities between locals who, in acting as viewers or creators, attempt to connect with their cultural identities. In highlighting one such case, Rahul Mukherjee (2012, 55) depicts how indigenous communities use the documentary medium to highlight the ‘changing cultural politics of tribal identities.’ These filmmakers ‘redeploy historical experiences’ to connect with the pact as well as renew local ties to mobilize against the marginalization of their voices. Acknowledging these significant interventions, I contextualize ‘regionalization’ or ‘region’ as the geography from which the creator emanates and where they practice everyday content creation. In investigating the regional content and community formation of online creators, I subscribe to De Certeau’s (1984, 117) idea of ‘spatial stories,’ which define a space as the ‘the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.’

Media studies scholars have also foregrounded the importance of regional and cultural dynamics within the spatial dimensions of platform localization practices (Tinic, 2005; 156

Venegas, 2009). The transnational exchanges between media businesses and the migration of people across the world (Appadurai, 1990) mean that geographical regions can no longer be imagined on the basis of one language alone. These studies serve as an important intervention in iterating the importance of language and region in the diffusion of internet practices across the world (Goggin and McLelland, 2009). This is even more significant in India’s case, as Indian regions and states were historically identified based on their cultural and linguistic lines. Through their research on Indian Bhojpuri language content, academics such as Kumar (2013) and Hardy (2015) have already cautioned against India’s narrow territorial imagination.

Platform/Portal Localization Strategies

By ‘localization’ strategies, I allude to the cultural logics that the NSE employs in imagining language-specific communities. As shown in chapter 2, the political economy of platforms/portals suggests that there has been a genuine attempt to expand their relevance across users, separated by boundaries, languages and culture. Social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook offer user interfaces in nine (YouTube, 2019) and 12 Indic languages (Varshney, 2018), respectively. These platforms have also taken initiatives to facilitate engagement between regional advertisers and creators through meet-ups and workshops to triangulate an ecosystem of advertisers, creators and audiences. At the same time, Amazon Prime’s content catalog in India offers films that are available across six spoken languages in India: English, Marathi, Bengali, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu (Pagnamenta, 2018). Further, in its bid to increase the convenience of navigation for native Indian users, it has also introduced the Hindi language interface along with forthcoming application developments in Tamil and Telugu language interfaces. Discussing Amazon Prime’s content strategy, Nabh Gupta, Marketing Manager for Amazon Prime, stated:

In India, the culture and language change every 10 kilometers. It is only when you make content available in a particular language and in a preference that will cut across the urban cities or the quintessential top 10 towns that you will be able to penetrate within the local areas and get them to use technology. Also, if you are sitting in Bengal, then Hindi is the regional content, or English is the regional content. That is why, in India, there is no regional content. It is either Indian content or global content. (Gupta, 2018) 157

Gupta is accurate in his exposition, as people in Bengal use ‘Bengali’ as their common language (Chatterjee, 1975). Similar to Athique’s (2009, 163) findings of the translocal appeal of Indian regional television content, Indian platforms/portals are mimicking the aspirations behind creating original content in regional languages.

AltBalaji portal (see chapter 3) offers 32 original web shows with a strong focus on Hindi- language content – although, one would find a solitary web-show within the content library in other languages, such as Marathi, Tamil, and Bengali. While discussing the local and contiguous appeal of the languages across borders, Sunil Nair (2018), Chief Operating Officer for AltBalaji, said:

If you look at languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Punjabi, Awadhi or Bhojpuri, these put together are sizeable masses. We had one show in Bengali, which, when it went live, was viewed by the audience in Dhaka (Bangladesh). Before that, we had never seen Dhaka in the top 20 viewing cities of AltBalaji. Dhaka actually became number eight in terms of city-based viewership ranking.

The cultural politics and commercial potential of languages form an important part of the content strategy for streaming platforms. Bengali, or Bangla, is the seventh most spoken language in the world and the second most spoken after Hindi in India. It also serves as the official language for Bangladesh. Bengali language’s national and global outreach makes it a significant value proposition for investment for the streaming platforms.

Priyam Ghose, who produces sketches and memes in the Bengali language on YouTube and Facebook, was invited to Facebook’s creator camp in Kolkata as part of the platform’s localization strategy in India. Detailing his experiences at the camp, Ghose (2018) noted:

Facebook emphasized the importance of having a page for content creators as they have added many features, analytics, etc. – for example, the publishing tool where you can create, delete, expire, reupload your post with a new date. Analytics help you keep an eye on your top videos, overall page reach, and your fan base – be it the gender, age bracket, country and the city they are from. Besides that, they wanted us to make more regional content as the Bengali 158

language speaking audience is more than Hindi language-speaking audience across the world.

Ghose also shared the analytics of one of his Facebook videos (Figure 6.3) to show the ways in which Facebook offers audience insights about its creators.

Figure 6.3 Creator Ghose’s audience overview, 2018

The gender, time and location-specific insights encourage creators like Ghose to ‘tailor’ their content according to the audience. Given that Ghose creates most of his content in the Bengali language, he finds that the majority of his audience is in West Bengal. The language-specific content appeal is evident in the fact that Ghose’s content has more views from Dhaka (Bangladesh) than from some of the Indian territories.

The commercial, cultural and transnational prospect of catering to the Bengali speaking audience has also resulted in the launch of two Bengali language-specific Indian SVoD portals, Hoichoi and Addatimes (discussed in chapter 3). As a company specializing in catering to the ‘Bengali’ community, Vishnu Mohta, the co-founder of Hoichoi, emphasized the importance of language and culture in storytelling practices: ‘It takes a lifetime to understand a particular community. Every community has a very distinct style of living and want to see stories in the languages that they understand’ (Mohta, 2018). By catering to a language-specific community, 159

regional creators gain the knowledge of catering to their local taste and develop distinct industry norms as a part of their content strategy. Common content strategies include borrowing from celebrated authors such as Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (Paul, 2018) to assimilate the existing patronage for Bengali literature.

While India sees a rise in portals that are increasingly localizing their content strategies by venturing into original production, Spuul, an SVoD platform with its headquarters in Singapore, functions purely through the acquisition and licensing of Indian television shows and films. With over 47 million registered subscribers, Spuul’s majority audience comes from South and Southeast Asian regions, North America, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand (Afaqs.com, 2018). Elaborating on the territorial and commercial advantages of catering for viewers in non-Hindi and non-English languages, Girish Dwibhashyam, Content Head for Spuul, stated, ‘If we want to target Canada and Australia, then the preferred language of the content will be Punjabi (language) as a vast majority of ‘Punjabis’ live there. Also, regional language content costs less than content in English and Hindi’ (Dwibhashyam, 2018). Dwibhashyam’s commentary is useful for understanding the scope that regional languages provide to streaming platforms in imagining diasporic communities.

Creator Localization Strategies

Cunningham and Craig (2017) argue in their study of social media creators that maintaining authenticity constitutes a distinctive feature of social media creators as it helps them to build trust and relevance with their audience. For Indian regional online creators, this authenticity is maintained by creating content in their native language as well as using themes and inferences that are relevant to their community.

The regional online creators I introduce in this chapter are located strategically at the intersection of films and television media industries and are separated by their content- production practices, styles and genres. Indrani Biswas, known to her YouTube and Facebook audience as ‘Wonder Munna,’ argues that a part of her online identity is synonymous with the Bengali culture of having two names, ‘one real and one nickname’ (Biswas, 2018). The word ‘Munna’ comes from her nickname, and her friends suggested ‘Wonder.’ 160

Biswas creates humorous sketches centered on the everyday lives of people from Kolkata. She writes, produces and edits all the videos herself. As a part of YouTube’s corporate strategy, Biswas was also judged the winner of ‘YouTube Next Up 2018,’ a concept conceived to recognize upcoming YouTubers with awards, production support and mentoring (Kundu, 2018). She highlights the motivations behind creating content in Bengali, stating that it is her mother tongue. Moreover, she argues that the scant Bengali content on social media and the need to represent ‘Kolkata’ and the ‘Bengali community’ inspired her to create videos in the Bengali language. ‘Wonder Munna’ (Biswas, 2018) outlines the relevance of her culture in her content-creation practices:

Bengali sentiment is very important for my content because most of my subscribers are in Bengali. For example, there are a lot of videos on YouTube which are titled ‘Durga Puja’ (popular Bengali Festival) and not ‘Pujo’ despite the fact [that] ‘Puja’ is a word from the Sanskrit language, but ‘Pujo’ is from the Bengali language.

Biswas’s emphasis on the word ‘Pujo’ as a term more relatable to the Bengali community is particularly interesting, as linguist scholar Anderson (1917, 1) notes in his study of phonetics in the Bengali language that the vowel ‘a’ is usually pronounced ‘o.’ The usage of colloquial terminologies, therefore, constitutes an important instrument for regional content creators to localize their content and build loyalty and trust with their audience.

Moreover, for many, it is a matter of pride to be able to create content that is non-Hindi and non-English language. Saurav Kar, the creator behind the Being Bong YouTube Channel, strongly argues that online content creators do not need to leave their city of origin and move to Mumbai to make a name for themselves. This, he maintains, is a common perception among some creators (Kar, 2018). Kar (2018) creates Bengali language content across diverse narratives from prank videos and vlogging to comedy sketches. He elaborates:

Online creators making videos in the Bengali language today are developing original ideas and not simply imitating other language creators. The Bengali community will relate more to the video as they have a sense of belongingness with the language. 161

Kiran Dutta, who runs the YouTube channel The Bong Guy, is another example of an emerging regional creator emanating from Kolkata. Datta produces sketches offering satirical commentaries on previous Bengali-language films and television content. With a following of over half a million subscribers on YouTube (The Bong Guy, n.d.), Dutta is one of the most popular vloggers from Kolkata. Incidentally, both Dutta and Kar’s YouTube channel names, ‘The Bong Guy’ and ‘Being Bong’ respectively, incorporate the word ‘Bong.’ The history of this word can be traced as far as the seventh century BCE when the Bengal province was called ‘Bong-long,’ and its inhabitants were known as ‘Bong’ (see Mazumdar, 2000, 28). Addressing these ‘Bengali sentiments’ helps them to retain the loyalty of the audience, who are often the Bengali speaking diaspora in India and Bangladesh (Dutta, 2018). The cultural logics of using these naming conventions are also on display as they navigate the dispersed online communities. The content production and symbolic representation of these creators resemble the everyday practices of the ‘Bengali’ people, leading them to develop ‘spatial stories.’

Sarang Sathaye, the co-founder of the digital media company (Bhartiya (Indian) Digital Party) who specializes in creating Marathi language content on YouTube’s BhaDiPa (Bhartiya Digital Party, n.d.), discussed the example of fellow Marathi YouTube Channel Khaas Re TV to highlight the importance of origin and identity in localizing content practices:

There is a huge difference in content creators who come from the metropolitan cities as opposed to those who are coming from smaller cities. For example, the YouTube channel Khaas Re TV (Khaas Re TV, n.d.) did a video (satire) called Are you EUUUUU +ve? (Khaas Re TV, 2018) and none of us at BhaDiPa was aware of what that term actually meant. We found out later that ‘EUUUUU’ is a way of catcalling women in certain pockets of Maharashtra. The video went viral. This input cannot be picked up from someone who lives in a city like Mumbai or Pune. It is not possible for creators from metropolitan cities to identify a trend like this.

Founded by film industry professionals Paula McGlynn, Anusha Nandakumar and Sarang Sathaye in 2015, content on BhaDiPa is produced under the banner of Gulbadan Talkies. While both Anusha and Sarang come from India, Paula is from Canada, where she graduated from the film production program at Simon Fraser University. Frustrated with the lack of creativity in the film and television medium, the team decided to form their own digital venture. These narrative accounts exemplify the regional content creators’ efforts to maintain ‘authenticity’ by conforming to what Hardy (2010, 239) describes in her study of Bhojpuri film professionals as 162 a ‘carefully constructed conglomeration of rural and ethical markers embodied and authenticated by a literal pedigree.’ These practices help them to build a loyal audience base of people who relate strongly to them.

At the same time, being a native speaker or coming from a certain geographical region does not guarantee knowledge of ‘ethical markers.’ Regional online creators are often more precarious than Hindi- and English-language creators due to their exclusive dependency on the language and community. Staying relatable is as important as storytelling. The creators achieve this by observing the everyday practices of the community through participation in community festivals, taking public transport and visiting public places, and even striking up conversations with strangers to understand everyday concerns that affect their lives. In observing their conversations and reactions to situations, the creators decide the upcoming topics for their sketches:

Whenever people visit a restaurant, the first thing they do is click a selfie and then post it on Facebook, and later when they are served with food, they will click the picture of the food and then post that too on Facebook.

While one might argue that there is a fair bit of generalization in this example, and the observations are not necessarily unique to the Bengali culture, reflecting on the city’s youth trends emerges as an ethical marker of relatability. By assimilating the diaspora’s linguistic, social and cultural traits into their localization practices, these creators are able to develop their authenticity among the clutter of social media content.

Regional creators also assume a distinct identity from traditional media practices by establishing themselves as ‘accurate’ represents of their community. Biswas laments how Bengali films on Durga Puja rarely capture the ‘craziness’ of the festival, often using it as a backdrop for a ‘love story,’ whereas Kar describes Bengali television as ‘unrealistic.’ While Kar and Biswas offer general insights from an audience perspective, the founder of SVoD portal Addatimes and ex-Bengali television producer for over a decade, Rajiv Mehra (2018), offers a damning account of television’s ‘hegemonic’ practices that were highlighted in chapter 4:

Broadcasters started interfering with everything, sometimes even asking us to change the colors of the wall on the basis of their liking. I heard one of my friends 163

who works in a production house saying that once a broadcast executive asked the director to give him 26 minutes of shoot footage within 24 hours or leave the job.

While discussing the state of Marathi films and television, Sathaye (2018), who has acted in both Hindi and Marathi language films, lamented that ‘Television broadcasters, of late, had converted the medium into a factory’ and ‘Marathi film industry was largely star-driven.’ These self-theorized accounts suggest a lack of agency and even opportunity afforded to them as they reflect on frustrations with traditional media’s industrial practices and content. As I argued in this thesis, the ‘feudalistic creative’ practices of the television industry and the closed network circuits of the film industry have driven emerging and existing creators to the internet as a preferred medium for creative expression. The popularity of these creators within their communities enables them to develop successful collaboration opportunities with streaming platforms and regional film industry talent with greater agency, as discussed below.

Exploiting the Cultural Politics of Language

Even though ‘Marathi’ language is largely spoken in the Indian states of Maharashtra and Goa, Sathaye (2018) argues that catering to the language-based diaspora in India accounts for a greater number than the population of certain countries: ‘The entire population of Canada is approximately 33 million, which is half of the Marathi speaking audience.’ With over 83 million speakers, the 2011 Indian Census reported that ‘Marathi’ was the third most spoken language in India behind Hindi and Bengali. Overall, Marathi is the 19th most spoken dialect in the world.

Sathaye acknowledged that Reliance Jio’s entry into the Indian telecom sector had triggered a motive for creating Marathi language content that could reach its regional audience. Media scholar Joy Mukherjee (2019) makes similar assertions about the ‘Jio effect,’ illustrating how Jio’s nationwide low-cost internet plans (discussed in chapter 3) make data consumption accessible and effectively bring down fellow telecom competitors’ rates, thereby ensuring an increase in internet penetration in the rural and semi-urban regions of India. Sathaye also suggested that the genesis of their YouTube channel ‘BhaDiPa was strengthened by his observation in the rural hinterlands of Maharashtra, where he was shooting for a Marathi language feature film titled Ubuntu. Sathaye (2018) reflected on how shocked he was to find that there were only ‘three cinema halls within a stretch of 300 kilometers.’ 164

He also noticed the rampant circulation of pirated Marathi feature films among these audiences, who could now afford huge downloads over the internet. Despite being the highest producer of films in the world, India suffers from a dire lack of screen infrastructure, with its current count of just 8700. This means that there are only about eight screens for film exhibitions per million people – comparatively, about 20 percent of the total screens of China and the United States (KPMG, 2018, 72). This leaves very little room for regional films that are already facing stiff competition from Hollywood and Bollywood. The situation is especially grim in the case of the Marathi film industry, as it competes with Bollywood in sharing Mumbai as the common site of production, exhibition and even audiences (Ingle, 2017). As Ingle points out, Marathi cinema also had to struggle for attention between 1960 and 1980, when Marathi audiences preferred other forms of entertainment, such as folk shows and theatre. Absorbed within the linguistically demarcated state of Maharashtra in 1960, Marathi cinema’s proximity with Hindi or ‘national’ cinema in Mumbai led to an unending struggle between ‘national concerns and regional representations’ (Ingle, 2017, 200).

BhaDiPa is one of the emerging Marathi language-specific online content creators in India, with a subscriber base of over 700,000 (Bhartiya Digital Party, n.d.) on YouTube. BhaDiPa’s content focuses mostly on creating comedy sketches and music videos that are devoted to the social and cultural causes rooted within the Maharashtrian community interests. However, given the limitations of funding within the regional online content on social media, Sathaye (2018) believes it is important for regional online creators to diversify their value propositions beyond the social media platforms:

There are various other platforms that one should take benefit of to create a place for themselves. One has to be multi-dimensional in order to reach the audience. The other activities include on-ground activation, merchandising, meet and greet, etc. Our first successful on-ground activation was funded by ‘Brewbot,’ Mumbai, where we conducted a Marathi Stand-Up comedy event at their brewery.

BhaDiPa has diversified its value proposition by signing emerging Marathi stand-up comedians. Based on the last fieldwork data, Sathaye’s company was managing the business interests of 15 Marathi-speaking stand-up comedians. This strategy highlights how regional online creators seek to diversify their business practices by bringing together language-specific talent. The congruity of language and region-specific traits in content creation practices enables regional creators to connect with their online audience. 165

The Potential of Regional Online Creators

In Kolkata, I was genuinely surprised to witness Kiran Dutta’s fan following. Until then, my imagination of on-site fandom practices within Indian regional media industries was rather ‘elitist’ and restricted to traditional media celebrities. This belief was quickly suspended when Dutta invited me to meet him for our interview in a Starbucks café located in a downtown mall, the Acropolis. The interview was interrupted every 10 minutes by eager young people wishing to take a selfie with him. Boys and girls, men and women, aged from 16 to 30, instantly recognized him and came up to him to touch him or share words of adulation for his work. Witnessing this brought home to me the importance of regional online creators within their local community. Dutta’s strategic use of social media for amassing popularity and gaining attention is similar to the assertions made by Senft (2013) in her study on ‘camgirls,’ in which she identifies those engaging in self-branding exercise on social media networks as ‘micro- celebrities.’ In this case, the actualization of Dutta’s online fan following in the mall blurred the lines of popularity between mainstream media celebrity and ‘micro-celebrity.’

The rising online and offline popularity of regional online creators gives them the agency to negotiate with mainstream traditional media talent and producers. For instance, Dutta confessed that he had rejected a collaboration opportunity with a popular Tollywood actor who sought changes in his content creation practices (Chakraborty, 2018), exemplifying a rare example of challenging the power appropriation between established talent from traditional media and new media. In 2018, popular Tollywood actor Dev and portal Hoichoi collaborated with him, in a growing demonstration of the interdependence between films, portals and social media, to create scripted 10-minute original scripted content on his channel to promote Hoichoi’s upcoming web show Hoichoi Unlimited (Dutta, 2018) (see chapter 3). Moreover, as discussed previously, social media platforms continue to engage with these emerging creators in lieu of tapping the Indian regional language audience. Dutta acknowledged that he was one of the invitees of the Facebook creator camp and divulged that the camp’s primary objective was to notify regional online creators of the Facebook algorithms and monetization opportunities. Through Ghose’s example, Dutta’s exposition is compelling evidence of how the NSE is showing interdependence in content and creator strategies.

As is clear from Dutta’s exposition of his collaboration with the Bengali language film industry and streaming portal, Hoichoi, it is not uncommon for film celebrities to promote films on a regional online content creator’s social media channel. Both Priyam Ghose and Karandeep 166

Jassal create sketches and short videos on their YouTube Channel Priyam and Karandeep (Priyam and Karandeep, n.d.). Ghose and Jassal acknowledged that one of their videos on YouTube helped Ghose to bag a small role in a Hoichoi web series, Gariahater Ganglords (Ghose and Jassal, 2018). Ghose also noted that his popularity on social media had opened opportunities for acting in advertisements and Tollywood feature films.

Coupled with their popularity on social media platforms, the regional online creators also leverage from their previous industry connections with celebrities to invite them for film promotions. For instance, in 2016, BhaDiPa developed a popular web series on its channel, titled Casting Couch with Amey and Nipun. The show revolves around two protagonists, Amey and Nipun, disguised as rookie filmmakers and calling celebrities from the Hindi and Marathi film industry to convince them to collaborate in their upcoming film projects. Shows such as these serve two objectives: first, the actors get to promote their upcoming films with BhaDiPa’s audience base; and second, they help BhaDiPa to showcase their ability to create engaging content with celebrities, attracting attention from brands and audiences alike. It is important to note Sathaye and his partner’s well-entrenched network with these celebrities, owing to their previous work in theatre and films.

As discussed in chapter 5 and through extended examples in this chapter, collaboration with regional online creators helps the film industry in reaching out to regional audiences. Often, the creators’ social media channels are used to spread awareness about a film. At the same time, these collaborations also have the potential to surpass national boundaries, as my respondents had received collaboration requests from Bangladeshi creators who were popular on YouTube. Thus, opportunities to translate social media credentials as a means for scoping future work across multiple mediums encourage regional creators to remain prominent on social media platforms and build a content portfolio and a large, loyal viewership.

Conclusion

Through the mapping of the regional original content creation space in the NSE, I have demonstrated how creators, as well as platforms, come to understand and negotiate India’s linguistic and cultural logics in catering to the online Indian audience. At the same time, the industrial regional content practices of the platform economy challenge the notion of ‘mainstream’ or ‘regional’ content. The selection of any language for content creation is eventually driven by its commercial, cultural and geographical politics. I concur that a 167 platform/portal’s strategy is determined as much by the creator’s sense-making and content creation practices as it is by its commissioning and facilitating practices. The multiscalar approach helps me to highlight the emergence of new voices and broadcaster-led portals and TV renegades within the regional online space that are contributing to the distinctiveness of the Indian NSE. As I have shown, these players show varying degrees of interdependency between themselves while demonstrating direct (collaboration with film) or indirect (frustration with television) influence with the traditional media in their everyday practices.

The increase in creation, circulation and consumption of regional online content can be placed against a backdrop of pushback against the incumbent Indian Government’s efforts to enforce Hindi language as a compulsory language within its National Draft Education policy under the garb of nationalism (Ranjan, 2019)—bringing back memories of its historical push for the Hindi language as a part of the nation-building project as shown in chapter 2. The thrusting of Hindi language, which in hindsight seems more of a strategy to invade the stronghold of regional parties in non-Hindi states, has led regional political parties – especially from Maharashtra, West Bengal and southern states of India – to protest jointly, eventually forcing the government to backtrack on its proposition.

Within the Indian media landscape, the paucity of film screens, coupled with an over- concentration of Hollywood and Hindi films, has threatened the visibility of regional cinema. In these troubled times, the increased internet penetration beyond the Hindi-speaking belt and demand for regional content from the local and global Indian diasporas has posed opportunities for regional content creators to exploit the cultural politics to their advantage. At the same time, marginalized by the ‘closed-door’ and ‘hegemonic’ practices of Indian traditional regional media, the regional content creators have created a distinct identity for themselves by using the affordances of social media to their undoubted benefit.

In the next chapter, I discuss the role of intermediaries, specifically examining the industrial and cultural practices of multi-channel networks and talent agents in enabling the creator labor movements across films, platforms and portals. I also highlight the dynamic ways in which they have adapted their business strategies to capitalize on the digital transformation occurring within the screen industries while also balancing the uneven power dynamics that exist between the creators and platforms/portals/producers.

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Chapter 7 The Role of Intermediaries

This chapter addresses Research Question 3 in foregrounding the significant transformations in the nature of Indian intermediaries such as talent agents and multi-channel networks (MCNs) in the NSE and looks at their role in facilitating creator movement across platforms, portals and films. More specifically, building on previous studies (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Doyle, 2018; Lobato, 2016; Roussel, 2017), I contend that intermediaries exercise a strong influence over platforms and portals, as well as content creators, through their roles as producers, facilitators and enablers of media talent and content. In doing so, the intermediaries contribute to the distinctiveness of the Indian NSE, whereby the advent of platforms and portals has altered the media management norms previously practiced in the Indian media and entertainment industries. As I will highlight in the section on the rise of new intermediaries, the demand for content in the NSE has led to the rise of ‘new’ intermediaries who provide portals as well as producers with novels written by native Indian authors, thereby establishing a link between the screen economies and publishing industry.

I borrow from Google's (n.d) conceptualization of MCNs as ‘third-party service providers that affiliate with multiple YouTube channels to offer services that may include audience development, content programming, creator collaborations, digital rights management, monetization, and/or sales’ (Google, n.d.). Such an articulation of MCNs has also been adopted by Cunningham and Craig (2019), and Lobato (2016) in their scholarship on intermediaries. Similarly, I borrow Zelenski’s (2012, 1) scholarship to define talent agents as ‘third parties’ that help the talent in ‘locating employment opportunities and assist them in making career decisions.’

Through diversification in media-management activities across traditional and new media, the Indian intermediaries have successfully readjusted their image from marginalized, invisible mediators to become proactive media industry trendsetters. The MCNs and talent agents have been instrumental in developing revenue circuits through their distinct industrial and cultural practices of content production, distribution, marketing, syndication and talent management. In doing so, both these components of the NSE have diversified from their traditional business operations to create their niche by identifying the demands of the evolving Indian media landscape. Unlike talent agents in the United States, who are legally barred from becoming 169 producers (Zelenski, 2002), Indian talent agents have the capacity to also actively produce their clients’ content. The Indian NSE has developed a range of industrial practices that are contributing to the flexibility and dynamism of the Indian media and entertainment industries under conditions of digital transformation.

Charting MCN and Talent Agent Distinctions

Talent agents and MCNs have distinct motivations for diversifying their traditional business practices of talent management and YouTube-dependent creator services, respectively. As Lobato (2016) highlighted through the analysis of US MCNs, the rapid increase of MCNs led to the sudden excess of MCNs, and their excessive Youtube dependency contributed to their collapse. However, in India’s case, this collapse was averted by the transformation in MCN business practices – their more active role in content creation and circulation in India. Three reasons explain this transformation. First, MCNs’ overarching dependence on YouTube had already made them a familiar entity among online content creators. Second, access to YouTube analytics also provided the MCNs with sufficient knowledge about the online users’ content preferences. Third, prior experience in online talent management and production culture ensured a safe passage for MCNs to pivot towards less medium or platform dependency. In other words, by reinventing their value propositions, the MCNs diversified in content creation, production and talent management across media sectors (films/television/online).

Similarly, Cunningham and Craig (2019, 140) observe how the rise of social media platforms such as Vine, Instagram, Snapchat and Periscope transformed the MCNs into multi-platform networks (MPNs), seeking ‘to craft management strategies for pursuing alternative revenue streams across numerous platforms and offer creators platform integration strategies and analytics superior to YouTube’s.’ However, in India’s case, the MCNs did not just deal with platforms and portals but also to some extent with film and television. The MCNs capitalized on the success of social media talent and their expertise in creating YouTube content with other mediums by pitching talent or content.

On the other hand, talent agents were often reduced to piecemeal collaborations with traditional media (film and television), owing to factors like less ‘talent and more star-driven’ industries (Dutta, 2018) and a lack of trust (Kohli-Khandekar, 2019), capitalized on socio-technological transformations in the creator culture and took an active role in brokering the deals between talent and portals. By guiding the content strategies of platforms, portals and creators, the talent 170

agents gradually gained prominence in the Indian screen industries from 2014, when Indian portals slowly started commissioning original content.

The market intelligence gathered from industry sources also led the Indian talent agents to assist the NSE with talent and content strategies. By trading these insights for economic and social benefits, the intermediaries succeeded in bridging traditional and digital media circuits, as well as creating opportunities across multimedia. In this chapter, I argue that by identifying gaps within the circuits of creation, production and commissioning practices, the intermediaries diversified their value propositions to operate as negotiators, producers, distributors and marketers of content as well as talent. I demonstrate how and why the intermediaries operate differently, and to what extent, in the NSE compared with the traditional media industries (film and television).

The entry of the global portals Netflix and Amazon Prime Video in 2016 played a key role in facilitating the growing importance of intermediaries. These portals were already playing catch-up against the transformative content practices led by individuals and native digital media companies on social media as well as incumbent portals such as SonyLIV (2013), Hotstar (2015) and TVFPlay (2015). In order to gain a foothold among Indian digital users, both Netflix and Amazon Prime actively began to seek collaboration with local producers and storytellers, as we saw earlier when discussing the commissioning practices of portals in chapter 2. Having anticipated this entry, as ascertained from the industry sources, the talent agents established a relationship of trust and partnership through knowledge and resource sharing with these portals, helping them to commission content by pitching projects as well as their internet-popular clientele. Their earlier experience of dealing with media practitioners helped talent agents to streamline the launch of portals by facilitating partnerships with credible and successful media professionals. As Indian MCNs and talent agents converge through media creation, management and distribution activities, retracing their histories helps us to illuminate the key distinctions in their value propositions.

Thus, while MCNs originated first on YouTube, talent agents have had a long-standing relationship with the film and television industries. MCN clientele typically are creators with a dominant social media presence but, more importantly, those who are camera-friendly. On the other hand, because talent agents are broadly situated across the media industries, they have come to represent writers and directors who might not be ‘influencers’ or ‘celebrities’ but nevertheless play a key role in the media-making process. This is not to suggest that MCNs are 171

any less capable than talent agents – indeed, I would argue that MCNs have played a significant role in shaping career trajectories on digital media. However, as I discussed in this section, the specific histories of talent agents and MCNs provide them with certain distinctions that are conducive to the development of Indian NSE.

In outlining these intermediary field practices, this chapter contributes to the small but growing literature on those who operate at the ‘high building’ level of CMIS’s multiscalar topography while also addressing Research Question 3, related to the roles played by intermediaries in facilitating the distinctiveness of the NSE.

Backgrounding Intermediaries

Bourdieu identified ‘new cultural intermediaries’ as those who delivered symbolic or cultural goods to the masses and formed an important link between the production and consumption of media (Negus, 2002). However, Nixon and Gay (2002, 498) describe Bourdieu’s definition as too ‘inclusive.’ They maintain that the definition ‘tends to cut across distinct occupational formations, cultures, and forms of expertise, as well as the rather different social composition of discrete cultural intermediary occupations,’ and caution against the generalization of all professions under the umbrella of intermediaries. On the other hand, Negus (1995, 1998, 2002) argues for the inclusion of accountants and lawyers as cultural intermediaries, reasoning that their supervision over business activities and contractual negotiations helps artists to concentrate on their careers.

While Wright (2005) acknowledges Negus’s position, he contends that cultural intermediaries are ‘definitely not bankers or accountants.’ Featherstone (1991: 44) offers a critical but rather broad interpretation of cultural intermediaries as individuals who ‘actively promote and transmit the intellectuals’ lifestyle to a larger audience and collude with the intellectuals to legitimate new fields such as sport, fashion and popular music and popular culture as valid fields of intellectual analysis.’ Featherstone’s position corresponds directly with intermediary transformation practices in India, where both MCNs and talent agents are expanding their value propositions as producers and marketers. The advent of YouTube led to the emergence of ‘YouTube networks,’ or MCNs. The similarity between MCNs and intermediary roles led researchers to include MCNs within the ambit of intermediaries (Cunningham et al., 2016; Lobato, 2016). 172

Maguire and Matthews’ (2014) edited collection serves as a useful link when conceptualizing and mapping the dynamism of cultural intermediaries. The book forms a critical point of investigation and articulates the role of intermediaries as cultural tastemakers and constructors of legitimacy through the affirmation of content and talent. Maguire and Matthews’ scholarship also highlights the perils of intermediaries, who are often under-studied due to their ‘inconspicuous’ working style. Kuiper’s work (2014: 52) discusses the invisibility of the labor of intermediaries, as they work ‘behind the scenes of cultural production’:

The actual work of intermediaries often is hard to observe, let alone ‘measure.’ It typically consists of long hours spent behind computers, emailing, browsing, twittering, and writing, interspersed with meetings that are often off-limits to researchers. Moreover, much of the work done by cultural intermediaries does not look like work. Their professional encounters and activities look deceivingly casual: sipping lattes at Starbucks, having lunch in hip venues, flipping through magazines, browsing stands at festivals and fairs, and most of all: talking to people.

However, Boyle’s (2018, 6) study of UK intermediaries reminds us that such a misperception only occurs ‘because their power and influence exist away from the screen itself.’ The industrial practices of the intermediaries have often been obscured or trivialised due to their often-perceived non-conforming standards of business practices, which Kuiper (2014) highlights in his work. It is thus increasingly important to articulate the practices of the intermediaries to assess their influence in determining a creative decision-making process. In this chapter, the significance of intermediaries will be analyzed from two perspectives: first, by identifying their India-specific cultural and commercial practices; and second, by discussing their relevance within the contemporary Indian media landscape. Parthasarathi and Athique (2019, 11) highlight the ‘synergistic combinations of formal and non-formal practices’ to demonstrate the interdependences within the Indian media economy. As I show in my analysis, the industrial and cultural dynamics of the intermediaries shape the formal and non-formal practices of the Indian NSE as well as the media marketplace.

While analyzing the practices of Hollywood talent management companies and the specialized educational courses offered in talent management, Stephen Zaffirau (2008) argues that talent agents perform similar roles to producers. Zaffirau (2008) emphasizes how talent agencies build media projects by consulting with their diverse clientele, consisting of actors, writers and 173 directors, and eventually selling the project to studios for profit. Roussel (2006) asserts that as the convergence of content keeps blurring the media, the roles of intermediaries such as talent agents keep being reinvented. Roussel (2006) emphasizes that as the boundaries between television and films blur, the agents need to promote, negotiate and market their talent to promising areas for growth. Roussel (2006) suggests that these measures require increasing specialization and departmentalization among the agents, ultimately contributing to new departments of talent management based on genres, sub-genres and talent.

Indian Talent Agents

This chapter offers a critical analysis of the role of talent agents in negotiating the demands of creators across the Indian media industries with specific attention to the NSE. At the same time, contemporary media management issues related to managing multiple talents, multiple aspirations of talents, assisting global media businesses in localization and venturing into production as a means of diversification are discussed in detail. In the following section, I discuss the contemporary industrial practices of the Indian talent agents in the Indian NSE to articulate their influence in shaping the content strategies of platforms and portals.

Perhaps the strongest intervention that the talent agents have made is in the field of stand-up comedy. An outstanding case is that of Only Much Louder (OML), which launched its operations in 2002 as India’s first artist management company for independent music bands. Over the past decade or so, OML has diversified its business portfolio to event management, content production and talent agenting, representing popular comedians such as the All India Bakchod (AIB) team, Kenny Sebastien, Anuvab Pal, Naveen Richards and Sumuki Suresh (Samtani, 2017). By uploading the stand-up comedy content of their clientele on social media, the talent agents have expanded the fan base of their talent and also created an additional revenue stream on YouTube. By 2019, OML’s worth was estimated at around US$10 million (Alves, 2019).

Using the prior experience of event management skills, OML has successfully led its stand-up comedians – who are already popular on social media – to perform shows across India, in locations ranging from metropolitan cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata to smaller towns and cities such as Kottayam, Vijaywada, Pudducherry and Vellore (Choudhary, 2018). This has expanded the scope of stand-up comedy to include a wider audience, while also mainstreaming the idea that being a full-time stand-up comedian is a lucrative profession. 174

Performing across diverse states has augmented the demand for regional creators, who are now practicing stand-up comedy in diverse languages and collaborating with established stand-up comedians.

At the same time, helping its creators launch YouTube channels has enabled OML to draw audiences as well as commercial deals. Raica Mathews (2018), a Senior Producer at OML, said:

Any artist can just perform and directly connect with their audience. These social media platforms have helped us, as it is easier to explain what we see in talent. We do not need to set up a meeting or chase producers (broadcasters, brand executives) for months.

As Mathews notes, it can be difficult to sell a talent’s reach to the producers where an agency lacks metrics to prove the talent’s popularity and skills. Furthermore, the Indian media industry is relatively new to the talent-management business, as producers are wary of relying on a talent agent’s expertise (Kohli-Khandekar, 2020). They would rather deal directly with an established talent than pay to acquire a talent managed by the agency (Dave, 2018). Unlike earlier times, where getting access to producers and convincing them about the talent’s potential proved to be a challenging task, the socio-technical affordances of social media have helped the talent agency to convince producers of a talent’s potential as well as negotiate better deals.

Reflecting on his association with OML, AIB co-founder Rohan Joshi argued that the terminology of a talent agent undermines the services it provides. Joshi identifies them more like ‘business partners,’ as Joshi (2018) explains:

It is important to find the correct talent agents as, often, creative people are not good at handling business. We [AIB] need people who can understand our business well and help us in getting the right brands onboard and, at the same time, will not go around spoiling the reputation of our company by pitching everyone.

Joshi’s views were echoed by Kopal Khanna, co-founder of a Tape A Tale, a business venture that provides opportunities to selected individuals to narrate their stories and then commercialises them through live events, a YouTube channel, brand integration and content 175 aggregation on other media such as Saavn, a music streaming platform. Khanna (2018) reasoned that OML’s relationship with brands improved her venture’s business prospects:

Sometimes, while pitching, one does not know how much one should quote to a brand. At other times, it is also important to manage the brand once they are onboard. This is where OML chips in with its experience.

She explained that the association with OML could help her diversity her content, which goes beyond recording or videotaping ‘one person talking.’ Talent agents have also performed their traditional role of connecting talent with suitable opportunities and, in some cases, even creating one where a handful of OML stand-up comedians wrote several web series for Amazon Prime to help it localize in India.

In 2017, Amazon Prime signed 14 comedians from OML’s talent roster to mark its launch in India (Pathak, 2017). Buoyed by the reception of these shows, Amazon Prime teamed up with six other stand-up comedians from OML’s roster to create web series. It also collaborated with OML talent to launch India’s first-ever digital talent-hunt for stand-up comedians, Comicstaan (DNA, 2018). The strategic collaboration with Amazon Prime for a talent show helped OML to keep an eye out for emerging talent while also popularising the idea of stand-up comedy as a full-time career.

Between 2017 and 2018, OML stand-up comedians Biswa Kalyan Rath, Zakir Khan and Sumukhi Suresh debuted in web series by conceptualising and writing shows such as Laakhon Mein Ek (One in 100,000), Chacha Vidhayak Hain Humare (My Uncle is a Legislator) and Pushpavalli, respectively. In doing so, OML made a crucial intervention for stand-up comedians with no formal storytelling background to experiment with fictional long-form storytelling such as web series. In helping the comedians to transition from performing stand- up comedy to writing as well as acting (Zakir Khan and Sumukhi Suresh) for Amazon Prime, OML has created new opportunities for comedians who are keen to work as actor/writers in high production-based content. Involving stand-up comedians in conceptualizing, writing, and role-playing for fiction stories has helped the comedians to develop new skills and imagine the various possibilities of engagement with narratives and storytelling that are not limited to performing on stage. 176

OML has thus helped stand-up comedians to transition from stand-up comedy to writing web- shows for a global platform. It is crucial to examine how talent agents can translate an artist’s aspirations into a viable business proposition at the same time as helping a global platform localize its production. Although these efforts were realized through Amazon Prime’s investment in stand-up comedians, analyzing these developments alongside OML’s industrial practices helps us to understand the talent agency’s critical interventions. As for Amazon Prime, this partnership allows them to achieve three objectives. First, it helps them to create localized content by identifying talent that has already been cherry-picked by the talent agent and assures the platform of the talent’s quality. Second, it helps Amazon Prime to launch with faces that are already popular on social media platforms, thereby reducing the risks associated with the project. Finally, it creates a distinct value proposition for Amazon Prime to compete with existing local and global portals that have already entered the marketplace.

The association between Amazon Prime and OML highlights the talent agent’s increasing influence in the NSE and its ability to contribute both culturally and commercially. It does so by developing projects that the portals perceive as commercially lucrative, pushing stand-up comedy as a genre, creating revenue opportunities for the talent and offering innovative and localized programming to the audience.

Diversification and Localization Practices of Talent Agents

By investing resources in local, regional, national and international media-management operations across films, television and new media, Indian talent agencies have taken a more active, strategic role in the NSE than previously. Consider the case of India’s marquee celebrity management firm Kwan, which represents some of the biggest celebrities across categories like Bollywood, regional cinema, sports and music. Kwan opened a new division, Kwanabler, to facilitate global investments in Indian sports as well as the entertainment industry while simultaneously creating opportunities for local brands seeking to enter the global marketplace (Tewari, 2018). Other investments include a stake in music streaming platform Saavn, actress Deepika Padukone’s apparel brand All About You and Gigstart, a marketplace platform to discover artists (The Economic Times, 2018). Kwan also holds a majority stake in Mojostar, a joint venture with marketing and licensing firm Dream Theatre, which focuses on developing retail brands through a partnership with celebrity talent (Choudhary, 2017). 177

To strengthen the talent database in the South Indian film industry, Kwan entered into a partnership with actor Rana Daggubati’s production house, Suresh Productions. Having set up a team of 20 personnel for its Chennai office, Kwan offers diverse services such as talent and event management, content packaging, brand partnerships, endorsements and production assistance (Everything Experiential, 2018). The investment in regional media businesses highlights Kwan’s further attempts at diversification and commercialization of celebrity culture beyond Bollywood. In 2018, Kwan also signed up India’s online creator Bhuvan Bam, the first Indian to reach 10 million views on YouTube, to strengthen its repertoire of talent in online comedy, featuring talents like Mallika Dua, Vir Das, Bollywood Gandu aka Karan Talwar, Amit Tandon and Suresh Menon.

Having signed diverse and successful celebrities across different genres and fields allows Kwan to influence negotiations with media businesses while also building a portfolio as a preferred company for representing talent. The global operational approach of its subsidiary, Kwanabler, highlights the transnational ambitions of talent agents by creating opportunities for collaboration with global brands. These strategies help to create space for emerging talent for circulation within the media industry landscape and gradually become a one-stop-shop for talent and content-led solutions. Kwan and OML’s micro-movements challenge the closed- network circuit of traditional media that offers opportunities to kinship over talent (Punathambekar, 2013). The diversity and strength of its roster also enable Indian talent agencies to have a greater say in negotiations while attracting newer talent looking for representation.

Localizing the Indian Operations of Netflix

My fieldwork coincided with Netflix’s premiere of its first Indian original web series, Sacred Games. Around the same time, I read a post on my Facebook feed from Datta Dave, co-founder of the Tulsea talent agency, sharing the Sacred Games trailer with a congratulatory note to the writers, all of whom were represented by Tulsea. Interviewing Tulsea also made sense, purely due to the fact that 30 of its clienteles were collaborating with portals other than Amazon Prime Video and Netflix (Bengali, 2018). Tulsea’s talents have contributed in different capacities for Netflix-released Indian originals such as Ajji (director Devashish Makhija), Ghoul (director Patrick Graham), Brij Mohan Amar Rahe (director Nikhil Bhat) and Sacred Games (writers Varun Grover, Vasant Nath, Smita Singh; co-director Vikramaditya Motwane). 178

Tulsea identifies itself as a strategic talent and content management company, representing around 200 media practitioners, the majority of whom are writers, directors and actors. Content management in this context refers to the content strategies (conducting writers’ rooms and offering content ideas) to the producers and portals. Since its inception in 2010, Datta Dave and Chaitanya Hegde have employed 16 executives to cater to the professional needs of their talent. Tulsea also has a creative team, the members of which cumulatively read around 100 scripts in a month. Radhika Gopal, Business Development Associate with Tulsea, recounted that Dave already knew about Netflix’s launch in India and had been in regular contact with Netflix’s executives from the LA office. This helped Tulsea to ascertain the kind of content Netflix was seeking and position its talent accordingly.

Elaborating on Tulsea’s collaboration with Netflix’s first web series in India, Sacred Games, Gopal (2018) shared the details of a series of events that contributed to their writers working on it:

When Netflix came to India, it had already bagged the rights of the book, Sacred Games and offered the same for adaptation to Phantom Productions, whose co- founder, Vikramaditya Motwane, was exclusively represented by Tulsea. Further discussions around the content led to the need for a writers’ room. Accordingly, it was decided that three writers represented by Tulsea would adapt Sarat Chandra’s novel, Sacred Games, with Motwane as the showrunner and co-director.

Besides offering its talent to producers, the agency also mediates by conducting writers’ rooms for web series. For Sacred Games, Tulsea put together a writers’ room consisting of its three writers to facilitate a joint writing expedition of the 947-page novel to be released over two seasons (Kohli-Khandekar, 2018).

By facilitating a collaborative scriptwriting process among writers, the talent agents achieve a three-pronged objective of ‘localizing’ Netflix, improving their talent’s storytelling skills and acquiring new expertise in organizing a writer’s room for portals. The success of such projects also enables a recurring source of income for the talent as well as the agents. Moreover, as conducting meetings with producers is a part of the talent agent’s everyday routine, they are well versed with the content strategies and budget details of most media producers. This information is often used as a source for pitching the right talent, influencing business outcomes and circulating market gossip for strategic interests. 179

Having produced their talent’s films in the past, Datta Dave (2018) articulated that the motivation to launch Tulsea was to represent writers who had often been marginalized in India’s audio-visual entertainment industry:

In India, there is an over-emphasis on the actors and an under-emphasis on the writers. Ideally, 20 percent of the budget should be spent on the star cast, but here, 60 to 70 percent of the budget is spent on stars.

Here, Dave addresses wider concerns regarding the unpaid and underpaid labor practices involving writers that plague the Indian media industry. Such practices also help to distinguish Tulsea from other talent agencies, which Dave suggests are ‘mostly focused on stars and celebrities.’ In raising the lack of respect for a writer’s talent in the Indian media industry, Dutta positions Tulsea as the writers’ champion as he questions Indian media industry practices (Mehta, 2018):

Do we truly respect our writers? Are we okay with the writer (lead writer/showrunner) being the creative producer on the show? Can we fathom the showrunner earning more than the star of the show? Are we comfortable with the production company reporting to the showrunner?

In the same article, Dutta offers ways in which industry personnel could support writers through fair compensation, legal policies that protect the interests of the writers and a writer- friendly culture that would allow them to work freely. By voicing the needs of writers, Datta addresses wider concerns that plague the Indian media industry and outlines the steps needed to give creators a platform that will enable them to focus their energies on one project at a time, leading to a better quality of content production for the media industry in general.

By fixing the price of its writers and negotiating assertively for them, the talent agents ensure that the writers are compensated fairly at market rates. This positions them as problem-solvers offering distinct solutions to both talent and producers. By addressing the marginalized and often neglected voices of writers, talent agents perform an important intervention by addressing the systemic pay inequities that persist within the Indian media landscape – much to the chagrin of the producers, whose budgets are impacted by fairer compensation. 180

Managing Multiple Talents

One of the crucial challenges for talent agents in the NSE is to manage the aspirations of multiple talents at any given time. The agency is tasked with the challenge of scheduling events, shooting dates, timely communication and due diligence of every talent’s contract. Any negligence on the agency’s part can destabilize its relationship with the talent and collaborators while also directly impacting its potential revenues.

Pankaj Mandal (2018), Digital Marketing and Analytics lead at OML summarised these challenges:

I think ten years ago it was more traditional that singers and bands do live shows only. But now it is so much convergent because the same artist is doing live shows as well as television shows. Biswa Kalyan Rath [comedian] is making his web series on Amazon Prime, also doing stand-up comedy and consulting. This is also the reason why the [talent] managers must know every trick of the trade.

So how did OML work this out? Mandal (2018) explained:

We have multiple managers – one who looks after his live events and another who looks after his content. There is also one brand team, which only manages the branded content. Since it is difficult for one person to be good at everything, we have different teams managing different functions.

As talent agencies manage multiple clients and their multimedia aspirations, this often gives rise to insecurities and competition between talent in the same profession. In 2018, creator Mallika Dua accused OML of sexism and alleged that she was paid half the sum offered to her fellow creator Zakir Khan for appearing on the television show Great Indian Laughter Challenge. Such instances offer perspectives on the quotidian challenges of talent agents as they look to expand their roster. Determining a market price for multiple clients operating in the same genre with a similar fan following can be a difficult exercise, especially when a talent agency is also negotiating for the same show. The challenge of managing the profiles of multiple online content creators and establishing a uniform level of trust is a tedious task, which calls for effective communication between the talent and the agency. 181

A mutually agreeable price for negotiation can help alleviate the tensions between talent and agents. Ultimately, the perceived value proposition that the talent agency can offer to its talent should override any inhibitions that the talent feels it can negotiate or any threats from the talent agency’s competitors. On the other hand, the blurring of boundaries between their personal and professional lives in building the talent’s trust is an unavoidable social transaction that has to be undertaken. A distinct aspect of these times is the opportunities that arise as a result of new platforms and portals, increasing brand investments in the online space, managing multimedia aspirations and the ability to negotiate fair market rates in a nascent and emerging NSE.

In sum, Indian talent agents have undergone a metamorphic change to cope with the contemporary demands of the growing platform economy. By assisting creators to make the transition from social media, they circulate the flow of talent to other platforms and mediums (films/television). Tulsea’s testimony also highlights the initiatives taken by talent agents in safeguarding and advocating for the interests of writers. Moreover, they have also played a crucial role in expanding the popularity of stand-up comedy as a cultural product for creation and consumption. There seems to be an invisible protocol in the industry whereby talent represented by intermediaries is invariably paid well and recognized for their contribution through fair contractual agreements. In helping the stand-up comedians navigate from writing stand-up comedy acts to episodic narrative writing for Amazon Prime, the talent agents have inadvertently challenged the conventional US industry practices of hiring established film and television writers. These emerging practices blur the boundaries between ‘amateurs,’ ‘professionalizing amateurs’ and ‘professionals,’ thereby questioning western scholarship such as that of Cunningham and Craig (2019), which principally situates social media creators as ‘amateurs’ and distinguishes them from the ‘professional’ film and television creators that create content for portals.

MCNs as Intermediaries

Lobato (2016) argues that MCNs play as active a role in the career of YouTube celebrities as a talent agent or manager. He reasons that the current YouTube stars not only sign a direct agreement with the platform for commercial benefits but also link up with MCNs to expand their audience base and advertising revenue. Based on his study of intermediaries in the United Kingdom, Boyle (2018) credits MCNs with the discovery of new talent and promotion in newer forms of storytelling. 182

In tracing the history of SME intermediaries from the pre-MCN to the post-MCN area, Cunningham and Craig (2019, 90) define social media entertainment (SME) intermediaries as the ‘bridge between SME creators and SME platforms, traditional media and advertising.’ However, much of the available scholarship identifies the business models of MCNs as YouTube dependent. Boyle (2018, 132) acknowledges the problematization of MCNs due to their dynamic business model:

The term ‘multi-channel network,’ or MCN, has been around since the mid-2000s and was used to describe networks of online content clustered under a brand, mostly curating short-form non-television content. Such is the pace of change that, while the phrase still exists, its meaning is shifting and moving from aggregators of online content and numerous online channels to a sense that generating and curating your own content and brand are becoming more important, not least as that age-old debate between content producers and platforms (and where the power lies) remains unresolved.

I build on Boyle’s analysis by highlighting a transformation within the MCN approach: embracing a more talent- and content-driven strategy as they try to distance themselves from YouTube. MCNs in India only began to emerge in 2012–13 in comparison with their presence in the United States since 2008–09 (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). Through an analysis of Indian MCNs such as Culture Machine, One Digital, Silly Monks and Qyuki Media, I show how Indian MCNs have reworked their business operations to focus more on a creator-centric approach as opposed to a YouTube or social media-centric model. An important part of transformation means functioning as a producer, organizing a creator network and localizing its services. Like talent agents, MCNs are becoming producers, in contrast to the standard western media industries that restrict this transition due to conflicts of interest. I highlight the platform- agnostic approach of MCNs in distancing themselves from being called a ‘multi-channel network’ to be more of a ‘creator network’ or ‘producers.’

MCNs as ‘Creator Network’

MCNs in India, such as One Digital Entertainment, Culture Machine, PING network, Silly Monks and Qyuki, actively produce and partner with content aggregators in addition to scouting digital talent in order to offer diverse content across genres of food, music and drama within the new media ecosystem. As mentioned earlier, previous scholarship (Cunningham and 183

Craig, 2019; Lobato, 2016) has articulated MCNs’ over-dependence on YouTube. However, the growth of digital platforms in India, coupled with the precarity of income on YouTube, has led Indian MCNs to quickly move from YouTube dependency.

Gurpreet Singh, the founder of One Digital Entertainment (ODE), voices strong reservations about the use of MCN terminology. He reasons that ODE’s business is about developing a ‘creator network,’ invariably hinting towards a less medium-specific and more talent-driven model. According to Singh, operating as an MCN is just one part of many business activities performed by ODE, which sums up the MCN strategy to shed YouTube dependency:

When we are collaborating with a creator, our purpose is not just to increase the viewership of the videos to earn money through it. It is more about how we can convert a creator into a brand by using YouTube’s reach and affinity. (Singh, 2018)

This strategy is not unique to ODE, as for most Indian MCNs and their western counterparts (Cunningham and Craig, 2019), the burden of responsibility is not so much about monetizing YouTube as highlighting the creativity of the client to maximize their reach and seek prospective collaborations with brands and producers. Singh’s approach reflects MCN’s dependency on the creator rather than platforms. Singh discusses the cultural differences between a process led by multinational companies and the ‘Indian’ way of collaborating with creators:

There is a code of conduct decided by YouTube as the way to carry on business as MCN. There have been several examples where the MCNs have not let off creators even when their contract expires as the contract is between the creator and the MCN. So a policy came in stating that the artist can discontinue from the MCN whenever they want to, and the MCN will have 30 days to convince them. From one side, it is of benefit for the creators, but if we look at it from the perspective of the MCN, it can prove to be a major setback for them as they invest many resources in the creator. But all these scenarios are uncommon in India, as India is a ‘relationship’-driven market. (Singh, 2018).

Singh’s emphasis on the relationship also articulates his sensemaking of the term ‘creator network’ as a more ‘human-led’ approach that looks beyond platform-specific advantages. 184

Thus, even though YouTube is the defining point of the relationship between the MCNs and the creators, the creator’s dependency on the MCN goes beyond YouTube.

The term ‘creator network’ involves multiple concepts. First, because the creator is in direct correspondence with the MCN to receive guidance on quotidian content creation practices, MCNs gain the status of being dependable and trustworthy. Second, the role of MCNs is not limited to content creation. It often begins with identifying talent, convincing them to consider switching to online content creation as a full-time profession and offering a team of content, marketing and public relations personnel to enable and support an encompassing, long-term career trajectory.

Prajakta Koli, a popular vlogger on YouTube with over four million YouTube subscribers, is a case in point. Koli was previously employed as a radio DJ before switching to vlogging as a full-time career. It was Singh who spotted her communication skills while the firm was creating a promotional video for the radio channel. After several meetings, Koli finally agreed to pursue content creation on YouTube with ODE as her talent agent. Third, MCN leverages the ‘network’ of its existing clientele of talents, brands and producers in pushing the new creators for collaborations, multimedia exposure and an expansion of audience base. In Koli’s case, ODE leveraged clients such as popular rapper Badshah to promote Koli’s channel.

In continuing with their creator-driven strategy, MCNs have also focused on offering content creation and production services, thus diversifying from talent to production, as is evident in Qyuki Digital Media and Culture Machine’s case. Founded by BAFTA award-winning director Shekhar Kapur and Oscar-winning singer-musician, A.R. Rahman in 2012 and joined by Samir Bangara in 2014 (Bhadani, 2015), Qyuki Media operates as a production house and talent management agency with specific attention to the music, animation, lifestyle, religion and comedy genres (Qyuki, 2013). With a set-up of 45 to 50 employees, Qyuki runs operations from its Bandra office in Mumbai. Speaking about the company’s business operations, senior producer Arunesh Kripal, who also worked on YouTube original show Arrived as the writer, stated:

Qyuki mostly works with a lot of social media stars/creators who mushroomed in the last decade owing to the grand success of YouTube. Qyuki Media provides these YouTube stars/creators with contracts and represents them, which in turn helps them in getting better exposure and more sources of revenue. Qyuki Media is constantly 185

trying to bridge the gap between mainstream media and YouTube artists by producing and conceptualizing television and web shows. (Kripal, 2018).

Qyuki has diversified from a talent agency to a production company. It has achieved this transition through conceptualization and production of shows like Arrived, Jammin, a singing- based reality show on television channel Sony Entertainment Television (SET), and Boss Dialogues, a talk show that began on YouTube but later migrated to broadcaster NDTV Prime.

MCN Culture Machine operates 715 YouTube channels and owns five YouTube channels, namely ‘Being Indian (youth entertainment), Blush (a lifestyle channel for the modern Indian woman), Putchutney (entertainment and comedy, Tamil), Viva (entertainment and comedy, Telugu) and Awesome Sauce (food)’ (Mulki, 2017). In 2018, Culture Machine also partnered with Amazon Prime to launch Putchutney’s original stand-up comedy show, marking its entry into the subscription-based global streaming space (Panjari, 2018). It also struck a deal with the regional television channel Star Vijay to create original content under Put Chutney (Indian television dot.com, 2017).

As discussed in chapter 6, Mohan and Punathambekar (2018) map the localization practices of Indian MCNs by studying Put Chutney’s everyday content practices and ascertain how linguistic and cultural diversities in South India are utilized to amass a native online audience. Such instances reflect the ability of the MCNs to go beyond the management of YouTube channels and venture into content creation. Culture Machine’s versatility in dealing across multimedia and diverse platforms and portals reflects the skillful ways in which MCNs are strategizing their business operations. Pitalwalla also affirmed that the company’s business model had diversified from ‘YouTube and inventory-based business to creating content for brands and streaming businesses.’ By expanding the value propositions to portals and brands, MCNs are trying to reduce their YouTube dependency as well as transitioning from talent- management to content-creation practices.

Diversification and Localization Practices of MCNs

In an interview with MCN Qyuki’s co-founder, Prasanto Das, Cunningham and Craig (2019) highlighted Qyuki’s strategy of focusing on language-specific markets to exploit India’s multicultural diversity. Like Qyuki, Silly Monks Entertainment Pvt Ltd, a Hyderabad-based digital media entertainment company launched by entrepreneurs Sanjay Reddy and Anil Pallala 186 in 2013, offers creative services in south Indian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Pallala initially planned to launch a television channel but instead went ahead with an ‘all-digital’ entertainment company as the investors were hesitant to make the larger investment required for a television channel (Ranipeta, 2018), thereby reflecting the advantage of the NSE over traditional television in securing investment, as well as the flexibility of the digital infrastructure over television.

As an MCN, Silly Monks Entertainment works with 651 YouTube channels in varying content aggregator, producer, and acquisition roles, clocking an estimate of a billion views a month. As the company’s tagline ‘ride on digital’ (Ranipeta, 2018) suggests, its operations are not limited to YouTube alone. Silly Monks also syndicates content to Netflix, Amazon Prime, YuppTV, Vuclip, mobile careers, and streaming music platforms such as Ganna and Saavn.18 Additional revenue sources include operating as a creative consultant for the digital promotion of brands, celebrities and producers. Over the last few years, Silly Monks has diversified its business operations to encompass events, merchandise and the music business as a strategy to cater to its fragmented audience base across distinct categories.

Silly Monks also manages its content operations under its three subsidiaries: Dream Boat Entertainment Pvt Ltd, Monkstar Music LLP and Event Monks (Economic Times, 2017). Silly Monks’ financial structure makes it India’s first digital entertainment company to be listed on the country’s National Stock Exchange, raising INR 15.12 crores (approximately US$2 million) through an initial public offering (IPO) in 2018 (The Financial Express, 2018). Silly Monks also launched a portal to provide multilingual content with a focus on Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam (Ranipeta, 2018). With offices in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai and Kochi, Silly Monks has strategically located itself within the spatial dynamics of the South Indian media industry and created a strong network between film and online media.

The industrial, cultural and spatial dynamics of Silly Monks offer insights as to how the localization of regional digital media businesses helps the company to play within its strengths and compete with other MCNs that are more focused on capturing the Hindi and English- speaking audience. Prior knowledge of the cultural tastes of their audiences, based on the success of their YouTube channels and the creators they manage, enable MCNs to become a reliable source for media ventures looking to tap into regional markets. By finding their niche

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within a fragmented audience base, MCNs attract partnerships and collaboration from platforms, brands, portals and producers that are looking to accommodate region-centric cities within their ambit.

In 2018, Silly Monks produced Amazon Prime’s first web series in the Telugu language titled Gangstars, a 12-episode series, with Silly Monks as co-producer with Early Monsoon Tales (United News of India, 2018). It also ventured into Telugu language content production with its maiden film, 24 Kisses, in November 2018 (Kumar, 2018). Its strong digital presence in Telugu language content has helped the company to secure promotions of Telugu films such as Brand Babu, Mallesham, Keshava and KGF.19 Additionally, Mumbai-based production company Aurous Avatar partnered with Silly Monks for the production and distribution of Telugu films (The Hindu Businessline, 2019), reflecting Silly Monks’ growing dominance in offering multi- dimensional services. The diversification of content spanning films, platforms in varying creation roles, distribution, marketing and syndication, as well as investment in the regional sports category, is indicative of the growing portfolio of a company that began as a regional language-focused MCN. Unlike western countries, most Indian MCNs have outgrown YouTube-centricity by diversifying into production, talent and media-management activities, thereby signaling a shift towards a medium-agnostic, creator-focused approach. The lack of dependency on YouTube has assisted India’s MCNs to remain afloat while numerous MCNs around the world have failed.

Rise of ‘New Intermediaries’

New forms of intermediary business are emerging. The Story Ink venture earned its fee by selling novel adaptation rights to Studios, independent producers, and portals. Founder of The Story Ink, Sidharth Jain, is an international producer, having worked with 65 writers across Los Angeles, New York, London and India. The Story Ink’s business operations revolve around scouting for novels that can be adapted into screenplays for films and portals; however, instead of a straightforward deal with authors, The Story Ink acts more like an intermediary, pitching these novels to producers. However, any commercial deal between The Story Ink and the authors is dependent on a deal with the producers. Thus, Jain manages to broker author–

19 https://sillymonks.com/movie-promotions/ 188 producer relationships as well as manage them by utilizing his social networking skills and creating a risk-free economic model.

Jain elaborated as to how he curates several books before shortlisting them for adaptation. The shortlisted novels are subsequently developed into commercial pitches by identifying potential producers and offering them creative solutions on ways to adapt them. The Story Ink thereby aims to provide consultancy on pre-production and production activities for its content without doing the production activities itself. Jain also assists producers to identify writers for adaptation from his earlier experience as Hotstar’s (discussed in chapter 2) content head.

Jain sees The Story Ink as a development producer rather than a talent agent:

It is a business-to-business solution. We are the enablers of stories where our role is curating, consulting, and connecting. It is like an ‘Uber’ of stories where all kinds of stories can aggregate. (Jain, 2018)

By ‘aggregator,’ Jain alludes to the access to novel titles that he can barter with the producers and portals. There seems to be scope in this model, considering the initial investments made by Netflix, to adapt novels like Sacred Games and Bard of Blood. As of August 2018, The Story Ink has managed to secure the adaptation rights of novels such as More Bodies will Fall, Remember Death and Dead Meat as a part of a three-film deal with a leading production house. Furthermore, it has also secured screen adaptation rights with leading production houses for Indian novels such as the comic book Caravan and the ancient mythology novel Avishi. Given the sheer demand for localized fiction content in films and portals, such a value proposition corresponds directly with the needs of the marketplace and enables The Story Ink to retain its distinction from the rest.

Conclusion

To conclude, the intermediaries contribute to the NSE (Research Question 3) by developing talent and pushing newer forms of storytelling through the facilitation of writers’ rooms, active production and consultation with prospective funders (portals, film producers). In return, the intermediary practices offer creators the freedom to pursue their art without having to worry about the predatory contract policies of the producers. There seems to be an informal understanding within the Indian media industry that the talent represented by intermediaries is 189 remunerated, irrespective of the outcome of the project, and that writers are duly recognized for their contribution through fair contractual agreements (Khandekar- Kohli, 2019). Intermediary services are also invariably sought by producers and portals to facilitate writers’ rooms and scout for novels that are suitable for adaptation on screen.

Together, these intermediaries, through their diverse industrial practices, are becoming indispensable to the new media and are therefore better positioned to negotiate contracts for themselves and their talent. Their ability to mediate the quotidian content-creation practices on new media demonstrates their power to influence the content that shapes the algorithmic culture of portals. My findings on the significance of the intermediaries within the Indian new media offer a meso-level, ‘from the top of the building’ (Herbert et al., 2020) perspective of how social relations mediate the industrial and cultural logics between the creators, intermediaries and portals, and articulate the various ways in which intermediaries influence on-screen media texts.

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Chapter 8 Conclusion

In exploring the platform economy’s social relations and economic exchanges in India’s creator culture, my findings highlight how creators adapt to the NSE to situate themselves within the Indian media industries. The thesis has demonstrated the continuities and disjunctures between the old and new screen ecologies and examined how informal-formal media dynamics shape the contemporary industrial practices of Indian NSE and the Indian media industries. In this final chapter, I review the key findings of the study concerning Indian online creators, intermediaries, platforms and portals to recap their possible implications for the Indian NSE and their relationship with the wider Indian screen industries.

Overview

The fluidity and complexity of the digital environment arising out of the convergence of broadcast, internet-based distribution and telecommunications companies have impacted film and television industries, regulators and content creators. The fundamental question answered by this thesis is the distinctiveness of the Indian NSE through investigation of its industrial practices and exploration of social contexts within which its key players (platforms, portals, intermediaries, creators) operate. Through a multi-scalar CMIS framework (helicopter view for mapping platform-portals, top of the building view for mapping intermediaries and on-the- ground view for mapping creators) (Herbert, Lotz and Punathambekar, 2020, 184), my research has examined the three different layers of operations of creators, intermediaries, platform and portals that exist within the Indian NSE. This approach is in line with the three research questions which sought to investigate the platforms, portals, creators and intermediaries within NSE as shown below.

1. To what extent do both platforms and portals facilitate the growth of Indian creator careers? 2. How do creators’ new business practices, professional identities and diverse regional voices contribute to an Indian new screen ecology distinct from dominant television and film industries? 3. What roles do intermediaries play in facilitating the distinctiveness of the Indian new screen ecology? 191

The convergence between diverse media and technology sectors has led to a wide array of interdependencies in the Indian media industries, as characterized in the NSE, and is demonstrated in this thesis at three levels as discussed below.

‘Helicopter’ View

At a macro-level, the ownership structures of television-led broadcasters signal the interdependencies between traditional television and the NSE. Reliance Jio’s entry as a portal and into the original content creation space and syndication deals between telecom players and portals highlight the interdependencies between telecommunications and portals. The macro- level interdependencies between film and portals can be observed through sole ownership of studios and portals (Sony Pictures and SonyLIV, Hotstar and Fox Star Studios, Zee5 and Zee). Finally, the entry of a native portal like TVFPlay, which was previously a social media creator, signals the platform-portal interdependency. As we saw in chapter 3, these macro-level interdependencies also highlight a distinct concatenation of global, local and multinational platforms and portals offering diverse value propositions to target the growing Indian local, regional and global internet-linked Indian diaspora.

A critical point that has emerged from the study of the competitive Indian NSE landscape is that a vast content library does not naturally offer a leadership position to any broadcaster-led portal. While a healthy television content library does promise an existing audience base, the rise of internet native portals and the increase in original content creation by broadcaster-led portals shows that consumers are looking for newer forms of content. The creation of original web-series like Asura, Sone bhi do Yaaron, and Scam 1992, amongst others, by broadcaster-led portals like Voot, Zee5, and SonyLIV, respectively, signal this intent.

One of the significant findings of this thesis relates to how platforms and portals facilitate creator and content movement through talent and content interdependencies. As we saw in chapter 2, interaction between the informal and formal economy plays an integral role in the development of Indian media industries. Specifically, in chapter 2, I have shown how the Indian film industry was driven by a range of informal practices in film financing (black money) and distribution (piracy). However, these informal practices were also vital in helping the government and the investors of the Indian film industries’ economic potential (Govil, 2014). Similarly, another layer of informality in the form of nepotism (Punathambekar, 2013) governed Indian film industries’ business transactions, especially Bollywood. 192

My research into the industrial culture of Indian NSE shows how the Indian NSE emerged as a site of continuity that formalizes the ‘informality’ of the Indian film industries by offering aspiring filmmakers that lie outside the social circles with an opportunity. While offering new means for monetization and distribution, portals have also challenged the exclusivity of theatrical distribution that cinemas offer. As I have argued in chapter 3, in offering an alternative medium for distribution, the NSE has shaken the social relations in the media industries between financers, producers, actors, and star directors—the varying levels of dense social networks that Lorenzen and Taube (2010) allude to while charting the evolution of Bollywood industry.

NSE’s global distribution network challenges Bollywood’s informal economic and social reciprocity nexus with exhibitors that frequently marginalized the theatrical exhibition of small and medium budget non-mainstream and regional films. The NSE also serves as another medium alongside television for films to sell its distribution rights. In that vein, many films such as Lootcase, Dil Bechara, Gunjan Saxena, Gulabo Sitabo, Penguin, Ghoomketu, V, C U Soon have bypassed the traditional step-by-step film distribution model of theatrical exhibition, television broadcast and digital release to premiere directly on portals (KPMG, 2020, 68).

Compared to the film industry, the informal practices of illegal cable transmission and the liberalization of crucial sectors gave impetus to the Indian television industry’s growth from Doordarshan to over 850 channels in 2019 (Athique, 2012). As we also saw in chapter 2, the Indian television industry could not cope with the sudden proliferation of local and global television channels and the growing consumption of television in Indian urban and rural households. Its heavy reliance on melodramatic soap-operas driven by perceptions of audience based on gender and class (rural-urban), and hegemonic practices of broadcasters stifled the creativity of emerging and existing creators. Thus, despite showing a progressive trend in revenues, viewership, and advertising, chapter 2 and chapter 4 detail how television industry is plagued by the lack of a ‘comprehensive system of regulation, the increasing political control of regional television channels and distribution networks and a structural problem with its business model and delivery platforms’ (Mehta, 2012, 614). The creator and content-based linkages between the UGC and PGC landscape signal the continuity in formal-informal practices within the NSE and show how the Indian media industries continue to be shaped by formal and informal social, cultural and economic contexts. 193

As we saw in chapter 3, YouTube became the unconscious carrier for facilitating global creator ambitions due to its early mover advantage as an internet-based UGC platform from 2006 onward (Burgess and Green, 2018). The subsequent launch of Facebook in 2008 offered Indian creators an alternative platform to help construct an emerging NSE audience. As we saw in chapter 5, YouTube’s monetization and Facebook’s reach allowed Indian YouTube channels TVF, Pocket Aces, Scoopwhoop and several individual creators like Zakir Khan, Aditi Mittal, Indrani Biswas, Dhruv Sehgal to create a space within Indian popular culture and emerge as an alternative to Bollywood and television. The contrasting industrial dynamics between television and NSE in India, as shown in chapter 4, have resulted in distinctions based on young, entrepreneurial and newcomer talent and content that is experimental, innovative, realistic and cosmopolitan.

Thus, the mapping of incumbent platforms and portals operating in India offers a distinct understanding of the interdependencies between them, based on the similarities of content and talent. Despite clear differences in the business models, architectures, and objectives between platforms and portals, this thesis shows how the Indian media industries’ structure creates reasons for interdependencies between them. This underpins one of my key arguments: that, at the ‘helicopter’ level of the CMIS framework, the Indian NSE is underpinned by interdependencies between platforms and portals, which is in clear contrast to dominant western models and answers Research Question 1 concerning the distinctiveness of India’s NSE and the role of platforms/portals in facilitating creator careers.

‘Top of the Building’ View

The meso-level is dominated by the work of intermediaries that, as I show in chapter 7, serve as bridges between the UGC-PGC, amateur-professional, platform-portal-film landscapes. Their work is personified by their duality of industrial practices in creating suitable market conditions by exploiting producers’ economic potential on the one hand and widening the network of creators on the other. My work on intermediaries has shown how talent agents and MCNs have shepherded Amazon Prime and Netflix’s launch strategies. By diversifying their business practices into media management and other media-related businesses, the intermediaries have successfully developed dynamic solutions for talent and producers.

In demonstrating the NSE’s dynamism, my thesis highlights the critical interventions by talent agents and multi-channel networks in establishing the platform-portal-film links through the 194

facilitation of content and creators. As we witnessed in chapter 7, Indian intermediary transformation is characterized by distinct industrial practices such as assuming a medium- agnostic approach, diversifying from talent management to content creation and media management practices, and mediating content strategies within the Indian media industries by facilitating communications between talent and producers. The intermediaries not only help to enable these movements but also take an active part in the NSE’s industrial cultures through production, marketing and media management.

To conclude this section, the research findings evidence the transformation of intermediaries in India as they have assumed a more hands-on approach to media production, marketing and management activities, apart from talent management. Intermediary contribution to the shape of the NSE is visible in the form of spearheading talent migration from platforms to portals as they transition from writing short-form content to long-form web-shows, actively producing content from their clients, helping the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime with localization in India, and providing an impetus for stand-up comedy in online and offline circuits. In analyzing their contribution, I answer Research Question 3 concerning intermediaries’ multimodal roles in facilitating India’s NSE’s distinctiveness.

‘On-the-ground’ View

My analysis of NSE creators in chapters 4-6 highlights how they take advantage of the concomitant relationship between the Indian formal-informal media economy to create opportunities across the Indian media landscape. The early popular culture on the internet was mediated by newcomers who neither belonged to the elite social class of film or television fraternity nor possessed any credentials to be a part of their insiders’ circle. Free from the obligations of adhering to the social pressures, these creators showed ‘insurrectionary’ tendencies in mocking the melodramatic excesses of Bollywood and Indian television (see Kumar, 2019).

As we saw in chapters 4-6, my cohort of NSE creators offered a mix of urban and rural narratives with a strong claim of offering a ‘realistic’ portrayal of Indian society – that is, more realistic than the melodramatic templates of television. Comedy and drama genres gained prominence and key to popularity for my cohort of creators who resorted to low-cost sketches and limited episodic web-series to build a strong relationship between story characters and audience. The early success of these genres and creators was exploited by subsequent portals 195

like Hotstar, SonyLIV, Amazon Prime, and Netflix as a part of their launch strategy to entice the growing NSE audience. Chapters 4-6 also showed how my creator cohort successfully leveraged the success and popularity of their content on social media to satisfy their desires for working in films and portals. In this way, the platform-portal links show a remarkable continuity in carrying forward the informal-formal practices that continue to pervade the Indian media economy. My thesis findings have shown that portals such as Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hotstar provide a larger canvas for my cohort of creators, reaching a regional and international diaspora with their creative capabilities.

In chapter 6, I showed how NSE exploited India’s transnational cultural appeal by facilitating content and creators from multiple Indian languages. In that vein, the focus on Marathi and Bengali language creators suggests yet another synergy in creator mobilization between platforms, portals and films. The NSE provides an alternative and cheaper distribution option for those existing and emerging regional creators who may not possess the financial capacity to indulge in traditional film marketing and exhibition expenses. One of the significant findings of this thesis is that localization strategies of the platforms and portals are as much a result of creator innovation. As I show in chapter 6, the ‘rural and ethical markers’ employed by regional creators on social media on their content brought fame and popularity to both, creators and platforms. Creators fan-following eventually led the likes of Youtube and Facebook to consider non-Hindi and non-English creators as a part of their creator development strategies.

The increasing penetration of the internet into rural and urban Indian households presents a significant opportunity for regional creators to withstand the hegemony of Hindi and English language content in cinemas by investing in the representation of ‘rural and ethical’ cultural markers. NSE regional creators can bypass the informal producer-exhibitor-distributor relations by creating a direct relationship with the Indian audience. Ultimately, the creators’ success on social media becomes a synecdoche for regional content creators to create demand for online regional content and form partnerships with regional film industries.The inroads that creators have made from UGC platforms such as YouTube and Facebook to PGC landscape of portals and films signify a form of media agnosticism, which is supported by the fact that many do not wish to be labeled based on just one platform, such as being known as ‘YouTubers’ or ‘Instagrammers’ (see chapter 5). Informed by the cultural and industrial dynamics of online creator culture, the findings from my research (see chapter 6) suggest that the online content creators are paving the way for localization by connecting to their roots and reflecting on their 196

regional identity and culture by creating content in local languages. The prospect of catering to Indian language internet users, who are expected to rise from 234 million in 2016 to 536 million in 2021, has led to a growth in demand for regional content on the internet (KPMG, 2019, 48).

There is undoubtedly a significant difference in production cost between the content created on platforms and portals. This difference is obviously due to the heavy reliance of the social media creators on brand sponsorships, advertising and viewership, as opposed to the upfront payment offered by the portals. However, the similarity between the Indian platform and portal content is creators’ ability to create relatable and innovative content for the audience. Those creators who can transition from platforms to portals have been able to do so by introducing political, social or culturally relevant issues of a modern India that is witnessing dynamic changes in terms of access to resources (affordability of the internet and the resulting access to global content) and consumption (transition from a single-screen to a multi-screen viewing culture).

A distinctive feature of the Indian media industry is its entrepreneurial set-up, whereby intermediaries adopt the roles of producers, stand-up comedians transition into web series writers, and individuals with limited media management and production exposure have floated successful digital media companies that include Pocket Aces, TVF and AIB (see, for example, chapters 5 and 6). While television continues to be the dominant force of consumption, with 197 million television households (EY, 2019), chapter 4 findings show that a growing number of creative professionals are looking to platforms and portals to seek more creatively challenging and career-progressing opportunities. Through the examples of ScoopWhoop, Arré, Bhuvan Bam, Pocket Aces, Shitty Ideas Trending (SIT) and Dhruv Sehgal, I have shown how new as well as existing Indian media practitioners have exploited platform and portal affordances to build career trajectories that previously seemed impossible to achieve within the film and television industries.

Central to their everyday NSE practices is the tensions between precarity caused by platform- portal algorithmic culture, elitism within film industries, the hegemony of television broadcasters and their desire to achieve medium-agnostic sustainable career by establishing a direct relationship with the audience. At the same time, these opportunities have been threatened by the precarious nature of platforms and portals (see chapter 5) and a lack of transparency surrounding the portals’ commissioning strategies (see chapter 3). 197

In many ways, the NSE enabled creator mobilizations through its own gatekeeping practices that were governed by algorithmic culture. The uncertainty surrounding the kinds of content the portals seek is leading creators to adopt a multi-platform strategy to reduce their dependency on a single platform and portal. While this has produced advantageous results for the creators and digital media companies, as shown in chapter 5, it has also resulted in unpaid labor from multi-platform content creation.

Precarity is not only financial or algorithmic; it is also highly gendered. My findings on the impact of the #MeToo movement in the Indian NSE (see chapter 5) highlight how on-screen liberal expressions on the internet do not correspond with off-screen working conditions. The various #MeToo cases in India’s NSE indicate the dire need for institutional and policy-level changes, which the Indian media industries need to promote a safe working culture for women media practitioners.

Thus, while Indian television remains the dominant medium in broader popular culture, the NSE is more effective and dynamic in addressing a modern India and its emerging urban, educated, digitally literate, aware and aspirational internet audience. While different business models continue to populate the Indian NSE, the popularity of creators and content amongst the audience play a critical role in driving platform-portal content strategies. In this thesis, I have shown how outsiders have their task cut out in establishing this bond in a country where films still occupy a central place in popular audio-visual culture. Finally, in answering Research Question 2 concerning creators’ industrial and cultural practices in the Indian NSE, I provided evidence of their multimedia aspirations and the precarious efforts to situate themselves within the Indian media industry.

The Indian NSE into the Future

Alongside industrial, social and cultural developments, there has been an increase in the number of online audio-visual content productions, owing to the emergence of new players who previously were invested in different business practices. This section charts the evolving NSE trajectories that continue to build on this thesis’s findings through industrial practices that evidence diversification among creator profiles, the impact of an intermediary intervention and the launch of new platforms/portals that could further blur the creator-based platform–portal divide. 198

Platforms/Portals

This section primarily focuses on the launch of new platforms and portals to articulate how their diverse value propositions could create new possibilities for monetization and career sustainability for creators. The Indian NSE landscape has witnessed new trends outside the timeframe of this thesis in the form of consolidation, shutdown, and entry of niche portals. The frenetic movements within the Indian NSE are an evidence of its emerging potential and yet, the departures and arrivals of portals highlight the unpredictability of the market. In such a case, it is even more difficult as a researcher to offer clear implications on the NSE future. While the entry of companies from other sectors into NSE serves as means for capital injection, the launch of Chinese and native social media platforms challenges the monopoly of the US- led Indian SME platform landscape. This section offers an overview of these developments to highlight the rapid growth of Indian NSE.

Since the beginning of this project, several new global and local platforms-portals have been launched in India. Reports have estimated that by the end of 2020, portals spent the estimated US $383 million on original content in India. Portals such as Zee5 and MxPlayer have forayed into the UGC landscape by introducing short-form video platforms such as HiPi and MxTakaTak, respectively (Sarkar, 2020). These developments bear well with the thesis’ findings showing an intricate relationship between UGC and PGC landscape.

As an example of market instability, HOOQ, a Singaporean portal borne out of a joint venture between Singapore telecom Singtel, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros, shutdown on 30 April 2020 (KPMG, 2020). Their failure to localize their programming is understood to be one of the main reasons behind their failure (Frater, 2020). Alongside HOOQ, Malaysian freemium service Iflix met a similar fate owing to its focus on western-centric content, as noted by its co- owner Mark Britt (Frater, 2020). These developments highlight the criticality of comprehending region-specific contexts while catering to multiple countries at the same time. Simultaneously, niche portals such as ‘Mubi’ and ‘Cinemapreneur’ have been launched to capture non-mainstream independent cinephiles (KPMG, 2020). Similarly, a BCG-CII report has indicated that between 2018-2020 approximately 1400-1800 hours of regional content was created, highlighting the overall significance of regional content in the NSE (Sarkar, 2018). Central to the rise in regional content is the increased investment of portals like Zee5, Voot, MxPlayer and the emergence of regional portals such as Telugu language portal Aha (Sarkar, 2018). 199

As an example of convergence between media and other sectors globally, both Tinder – a dating application – and Airbnb – an accommodation rental application – have begun to venture into original content productions to stimulate interest in their existing respective businesses (Garcia and Moon, 2019). According to the trade press literature, while Tinder has already completed the filming of its first web series, Airbnb is planning to develop an in-house studio to establish itself as a lifestyle brand, with the grapevine suggesting that it is working on a show for Apple’s streaming platform, Apple TV (Statt, 2019).

Within India, Flipkart, a Walmart owned e-commerce platform, has launched a ‘Video’ and an ‘Ideas’ toolbar to support its e-commerce business and engage in multiple ways with its consumers. Flipkart ‘Ideas’ is a curated feed that merges brands’ and influencers’ content in multimedia formats (videos, polls, stories, GIFs, quizzes) to influence consumer shopping decisions (Khatri, 2019). On the other hand, for its ‘Video’ section, Flipkart features syndicated content from multiple online creators such as Arré and Pocket Aces, as well as portals such as Voot and TVFPlay.

Similarly, Paytm, an e-commerce platform and digital wallet company owned by a slew of investors, such as Softbank, SAIF Partners, Alibaba Group and Ant Financial (Sorrells, 2019), is planning to venture into short-form video content, news and live television (Khatri, 2019). Such diversification is akin to Amazon’s ‘eco-sphere’ business model (see Tiwary, 2020) and signals the convergence between diverse industrial sectors, and serves as means of capital injection into the growing NSE. The increased attention to the media business also offers positive news for NSE media start-ups to exchange their content library for a fixed cost while also offering an alternative to consider for content creation.

The diversity of their value propositions, evident from their business ventures, genres and formats, presents some distinct opportunities for creators of every format to expand their footprints beyond Facebook and YouTube. To further challenge the domination of Facebook, a trio of Indian engineers – Bhanu Singh, Ankush Sachdeva and Farid Ahsan – have launched Sharechat, a social media application that facilitates 14 Indian languages and has amassed over 30 million users (Biswas, 2018). The Indian user-centric start-up operates from Bengaluru and has embraced Indian multilingual diversity, with close to 100 employees from 21 states (Biswas, 2018). Sharechat boasts high-profile investors such as Twitter, Trustbridge Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Shunwei Capital, Hill House, Morningside Venture Capital, India Quotient and SAIF Capital (India Business Law Journal, 2019). In 2020, Sharechat facilitated a 200

total of 28 million creators, 750 million UGC with a daily average user time of 24 minutes (Eight women amongst top 10 creators, 2020) Sharechat’s entry offers acritical dimension to the Indian NSE.

By focusing strictly on Indian languages, it promotes and fosters a creator culture that is more likely to lag in comparison with English creators on YouTube and Facebook. If Sharechat can find meaningful ways to extend its user base to engage with 234 million Indian language internet users (predicted to reach 536 million by 2021) (KPMG, 2018), it will undoubtedly offer a more lucrative value proposition for Indian language creators as well as brands intending to find their target audience (Biswas, 2018). To that effect, it has already started offering monetary incentives to regional language creators who are currently using YouTube and Facebook (Ghose, 2018). Such a local intervention is crucial as, unlike the Indian portal scene, Indian SME is still dominated by US players like Google and Facebook. ShareChat presents Indian NSE with a distinct opportunity to boost Indian regional and local creators’ profiles whose popularity is highly subjected to their success on YouTube and Facebook.

India’s free marketplace economy and its rising online viewership have also attracted interest from Chinese companies that are not content with just being investors in Indian media ventures (Russell, 2019). Competing alongside Sharechat and Facebook in India is China’s social media platform Helo, launched by Chinese technology company Bytedance in 2018 and available in 14 Indian languages; it offers a mix of videos, memes, GIFs, jokes, shayaris and film gossip, among other content genres (Ahuja and Dalal, 2018). Bytedance takes pride in its success of two million daily active Indian users. Bytedance’s backend machine learning and deep learning algorithms allow the platform to track user time and interaction on content and actions such as ‘taps swipes, pauses and comments’ (Shaikh, 2018).

In 2019, Helo launched its third season of Helo Superstar. This campaign encourages Indian creators to speak in any of the nine Indian languages such as ‘Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Marathi, Bengali and Gujarati’ to create content across ten different categories, such as entertainment, education, sports and food among others (‘Helo Launches 3rd Season,’ 2019). The commercial prospects of catering to large numbers of native Indian language internet users, which are estimated to increase from 234 million in 2017 to 536 million in 2021 as compared to 175 million English users, is not lost on Chinese investors, who developed 44 out of the top 100 downloaded apps in India on Google Playstore (Russell, 2019). 201

As Figure 8.1 shows, Bytedance-owned video application TikTok, a 15-second video application that facilitates content creation in 10 Indian languages besides English, is the top downloaded application in India in 2018.

Figure 8.1 Five of the top 10 apps in India, 2018. Source: Russell (2018).

TikTok was first launched in China in 2012, and has rapidly grown to emerge as a globally successful short-form content destination in 150 countries and about 75 languages (Fannin, 2019). Its low-barrier entry and 15-second limited duration have made it an eclectic medium of expression for Indian users, who may not have the wherewithal to shoot high-quality videos. TikTok’s popularity in India can be traced from its numbers, as shown in Figure 8.2.

Figure 8.2 TikTok India statistics. Source: Singh and Ananth (2019).

Speaking positively about TikTok’s sophisticated use of algorithmic intelligence, journalist and author Fannin (2019) notes that: 202

TikTok uses the app’s algorithms to decide which videos to show users, dictates their feed entirely, and learns their preferences the more one uses it. This is different from Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, which use AI to recommend posts rather than send feeds to users directly.

With a monthly active user base of 120 million, TikTok is trying to attract partnership opportunities for brands and advertisers (Kar, 2019). Simultaneously, the platform has organized several campaigns such as #MyTikTokStory and Pepsi’s #SwagStepChallenge and organizing ‘Creator lab,’ a roadshow in Mumbai, to facilitate the creation and uploading of TikTok videos (Mahadevan, 2019). Besides TikTok and Helo, ByteDance also runs Vigo, another short-form video platform in India, which is said to have 20 million users. With a local hiring plan of 1500 in India and a proposed investment of US$1 billion (Singh, 2019), Bytedance is already threatening Facebook and YouTube’s popularity with its varied online audio-visual investments in platforms (Singh and Ananth, 2019).

The listing of emerging local and global platforms and portals is meant to indicate the growing economic appeal of the Indian NSE in the minds of private investors. However, NSE’s potential as a lucrative international market depends on how the Indian government deals with national security and censorship issues. According to media scholar Prem Poddar (2020), the Indian Government’s ban of TikTok and 58 Chinese applications in 2020 citing national integrity and sovereignty issues as a response to India’s skirmish with China in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh signals an era where wars are fought on digital borders. Moreover, as we saw in chapter 5, the Indian government’s perception of NSE as another vehicle for enforcing pro- Hindutva policies, monitoring ‘cultural expressions,’ and implementing digital surveillance in the name of welfare (see Thomas, 2019) will do little to assuage its claims of being a neo- liberal market-friendly country.

Another critical aspect to consider while comprehending the sudden burst of UGC platforms is the ability to monetize short-form videos. As we have observed in chapter 5, sketches and short-form content were vital to several cash-strapped Indian SME creators’ early successes. The ability to commercialize short-form videos was critical to some of my creator cohort’s survival, who were also successful in practicing their video-making skills on the shorter format before transitioning to longer format web-shows. The existence of multiple short-form friendly video sites, while offering more alternatives for commercialization, also signals a more 203 significant opportunity for commercializing amateurs to work their way towards the PGC landscape.

Central to NSE growth is the role of the Indian government in resolving the lingering issues of the digital divide. As Thomas (2019, 60) argues, ‘closing the digital divide will also result in the resolving of other divides in society.’, the sorts of which have been enumerated in detail in chapter 2. Taken together, these developments contribute to the arguments I have made in this thesis regarding the distinctiveness of the Indian NSE and the ability of these emerging content delivery systems to offer new socio-technological affordances in cultivating ‘influencer’ culture that can be sustained across the Indian media industries. Moreover, the entry of platforms like TikTok and ShareChat also signals a direct competition to the US monopoly in Indian SME and another opportunity for facilitating creator mobilizations within the Indian media industries.

Shifting Power Dynamics of Intermediaries?

As witnessed earlier, the advent of the NSE has also enabled the talent agents to diversify themselves besides dealing with Amazon Prime and Netflix. The NSE has therefore helped the talent agents and multi-channel networks to establish their role and significance in mediating the decisions that shape the cultural modes of negotiating creative practices. However, as the demand for content and content creators continues to increase, the businesses of those who can identify the talent and produce content will emerge as the driving force for running the marketplace. As highlighted in chapter 7, the talent agents and multi-channel networks have assumed a stronger position than ever in negotiating the value propositions regarding the demand and supply of content and talent. However, the rise of intermediaries posits new concerns, as such a power imbalance marginalises creators’ ability to choose their own projects. I hope future researchers will investigate the implications of intermediaries’ growing influence on the media industries.

While my cohort agreed to the influence of talent agents in gaining work for creators, helping them to navigate through contracts and negotiations with producers, they acknowledged that the growing power of talent agents and multi-channel networks also meant there was pressure to affirm deals that were brought by them. Some established creators (acclaimed writers and directors who did not wish to be named) alluded to the fact that often the deals brought by agents had to be responded to, despite their reluctance due to the perceived control of the 204

producer over the content creating disharmony between the agency and the talent. At other times, creators lamented that talent agencies pressured writers to come up with new content to stay ‘in the minds’ of producers. Thus, the constant pressure to ‘remain in the game’ affected the creative space of the creator, leading to tensions between the agency and its talent.

Creators elaborated that the capitalistic tendencies of talent agencies would often harm the interests of the talent. The talent agency would pursue five deals as opposed to the one deal that might interest the talent the most. However, the five deals would enable talent agents to maximise their earnings. The aspiration to make the most money out of the talent could therefore potentially lead to subversive methods of exploitation, slipped under the veil of providing more opportunities to their talent.

Creators also discussed how the Indian media industry is fraught with relationships that are often cultivated through periods of long collaboration. Writers and directors develop these relationships and over a period maintain informal networks with producers. Often these networks are later utilised to discuss business opportunities without any direct assistance from the talent agents. There is thus a tone of informality in the way Indian media practitioners operate, resulting in an added challenge on the behalf of talent agents to rationalize their services.

Furthermore, as Pitalwalla, MCN Culture Machine co-founder (see chapter 7) highlighted, there is a huge risk of the talent moving on as it reflects a loss of business (economic) and goodwill (social capital) for intermediaries. On the other hand, if the talent feels cheated or does not see growth, the partnership is not mutually beneficial, and it is only fair that they part ways with their agents. Thus, there is a constant struggle on the part of the intermediaries to be relevant in an already precarious creative industry.

Creators

As chapters 5 and 6 demonstrated, the new media ecology also offers new ways for creators to imagine and build their media careers. The continuous development of diverse online creators from practising short-form videos and uploading stand-up comedy acts and sketches on social media to featuring in web series on portals and securing prominent roles on feature films will only challenge the elitist distinctions such as UGC and PGC that have been made based on 205

platforms and portals respectively. The idea that a creator learns either through practice and trial and error, or through formal training, should have been embraced a long time ago.

As we witness an increase in the movement of creators across the media ecology, creators are increasingly leveraging their popularity to exercise their agency in prioritizing opportunities within the NSE. As an example of platform-portal agnostic approach, Priyam Ghose, an online creator from Kolkata, whose example was cited in chapter 6, left his job as a social media executive on portal Hoichoi to focus on creating content across different platforms. Ghose argued that the remuneration he received from the company for the time he spent could be better compensated and utilised respectively in building his own already active channel on social media platforms. Ghose’s example reflects how creators industrial practices blur the perceptions of UGC as a site for amateurs. Ghose’s preference for platform labor over portal also shows how some creators co-exist within NSE space as a freelancer than pledge their loyalty to a single platform or portal.

What began as a reliant and over-dependent relationship on one platform has evolved into a much more nuanced and complex political economy between platforms, portals, broadcasters, studios, and producers and creators. Similarly, Abhishek Banerjee, the founder of Casting Bay (see chapter 4), who appeared in short films and sketches on YouTube, appeared as a protagonist in the Amazon Prime web series Paatal Lok (Hell) in 2020. The project was put together by the talent agency Tulsea (see chapter 7), as growing evidence of intermediary intervention and creator mobilization (from casting to acting on YouTube to appearing as a protagonist). Also, Arré, a digital media company (see chapter 5) with popular social media verticals for sketches and web shows across multiple genres, developed a web series for the newly launched portal MX player in further evidence of platform–portal creator interdependency.

In building on the evidence of porosity between Bollywood, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix portals that I outlined in chapter 3, the thesis findings signal to Bollywood the desire of practitioners to be seen as global talent. Amazon Prime and Netflix’s global outreach makes them lucrative destinations for Bollywood personnel. In concluding her seminal study on Bollywood’s production culture, Ganti (2012, 366) recalls how the allure of receiving global fame and circulation of Bollywood content continues to trouble several emerging and existing Bollywood directors and producers. 206

The desire to be seen as global media practitioners and be known ‘not as the Indian Scorsese – but the Scorsese’ (film director Abhishek Chaubey, cited in Ganti, 2012, 366) by demonstrating high levels of production and engaging storytelling practices has stepped up with the presence of portals such as Amazon Prime Video and Netflix. I build on Ganti’s (2012) epilogue on the Bollywood’s attempts to situate its production culture on par with the international film culture by highlighting how my cohort of creators use the NSE for satisfying their global ambitions. As an example, while discussing his career aspirations, the head of TVF’s YouTube vertical Screenpatti (see chapters 4 and 5), Amrit Gupta (2018), remarked:

A person like me dreams of making a show of the level of Netflix. I want to achieve something as big as Narcos in India, I need the required amount of investment, and if the brand does not support me in giving me the required investment, I will pitch to OTT portals like Amazon and Netflix.

The opportunity to unpack complex political, social and cultural themes and experiment with freedom on uncensored portals has also attracted Bollywood producers such as Dharmatic Entertainment (the digital arm of popular film production company Dharma Productions) Loneranger Productions (owned by Director Vikram Bhatt), Excel Entertainment Pvt. Ltd (owned by Actor/Writer/Producer/Director Farhan Akhtar and Producer Ritesh Sidhwani), JAR Pictures (owned by Producers Ajay Rai and Alan McAlex), D2R films (owned by director/writer/producers DK and Raj Nidimoru) and Red Chillies (owned by popular actor Shah Rukh Khan) (Saini, 2019), as discussed in chapter 3.

While discussing the benefits of distributing the film on Netflix, filmmaker Makhija pointed out that his feature film Ajji (Grandmother) was censored in film theatres but was uncut when streamed by Netflix. My cohort of creators also alluded to these portals’ ability to take risks in commissioning original content driven by the script rather than stars. Actress Radhika Dugal, whose profile I detailed in chapter 4, remarked that at the end of the day, [both] Netflix and Amazon Prime have the reach and the capital to support new creators and actors.’

In examining the proximity between the portals and Bollywood, I argue that Bollywood assumes a different characteristic on these portals, whereby its industry status is no longer defined by being ‘aggressively oriented toward box-office success and broad audience appeal’ (Ganti, 2013, 3). In placing Indian content alongside international content, global portals have also exposed and challenged the star-driven narratives of Bollywood. In times to come, it will 207

be interesting to see whether the NSE portals will continue to challenge Bollywood’s informal networks by offering opportunities to ‘outsiders’ or, like film studios, conform to elitist practices by preferring kinship in recruitment of its employees or in buying ‘star-driven’ films over merit.

Closing Note

This study contributes to a growing body of research (Bouquillion, 2020; Tiwary, 2020; Athique, 2020; Fitzgerald, 2020; Kay, 2018; Kumar, 2015, 2016; Mohan and Punathambekar, 2018) that is mapping the development of Indian platform economy. It addresses gaps in the media industry studies literature on the dynamics of digital transformation in the screen industries in a region-specific context and contributes to a body of literature on Indian digital production cultures. As a critical media scholar, my thesis has explored who gets these opportunities and the extent to which they not only shape one’s media career but ultimately also affect the existing structures within which the media industries operate.

As for the creators aspiring to build media careers, social media platforms’ concentration offers new ways to express creativity, gain fame, and reach and improve their commercial possibilities within the overall media circuit. As Cunningham and Craig (2019) argue in their study of creators on social media, the work, working conditions and cultural politics of social media creators are distinct enough to be considered as a site for studying social media entertainment as an industry. Building on this foundation, my findings show that the distinctiveness of the Indian NSE arises from the platform–portal–film interdependencies that are actualized through the industrial practices of creators, platform/portal executives and intermediaries, as well as the NSE’s contrasting production culture with the television industry.

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Appendix

Interviewees for the Study

S. No. Respondent Designation Company Profile 1 Vishal Chopra Supervising 101 Media Content creator Producer 2 Abhijit Deb Creative Producer ZEE5 SVoD executive 3 Anirudh Pandit Co-founder Pocket Aces Content creator 4 Sidharth Anand Vice-President, SaReGaMaPa Content creator Films and (web series, National TV movies)

5 Pankaj Mandal Head of Digital OML Intermediary Marketing

6 Anuvab Pal Writer – web Independent Content creator series, films 7 Chhavi Mittal Founder SIT Online media company 8 Indranil CEO Big Synergy Content creator Chakraborty 9 Sunil Nair COO ALTBalaji SVoD executive 10 Navin Kasturia Freelancer Independent Actor, content creator 11 Amit Singh Executive Times Network, Ex Content creator Producer Culture Machine (MCN)

12 Amrit Raj Associate Screenpatti, TVF Content creator Gupta Creative Director, TVF; YouTube Channel Head, Screenpatti 13 Ankur Dobriyal Creative Post ScoopWhoop Content creator Producer 14 D Girish Head of Content Spuul SVoD executive 15 Datta Dave Founder Tulsea Pictures Intermediary 16 Dhruv Sehgal Senior Content Dice Media Content creator Creator 17 Durjoy Online Content Friday Night Originals Content creator Chowdhury Creator, Indie Music 264

18 Eklavya Chief Strategy ALTBalaji SVoD Bhattacharya Officer executive 19 Gaurav Gandhi Group Head, VOOT, Amazon Prime Ex-COO, Amazon Prime VOOT; Group Head, Amazon Prime 20 Gurpreet Singh Co-founder One Digital Entertainment Intermediary

21 Jhanvi Freelancer The Drama Queen Content creator

22 Jigisha Mistry Head, Mumbai YouTube Spaces YouTube executive

23 Karandeep Creator Independent Content creator Jaiswal 24 Kopal Khanna Founder Tape A Tale Content creator

25 Nabh Gupta Marketing Amazon Prime SVoD Director executive 26 Nidhi Bisht Creative Director TVF Content creator

27 Niyati VP Product & Arré Content creator Merchant Business Head 28 Padmini Kutty Founder Founder, Vaishnavee Content creator Mediaworks Ltd

29 Prateek Raina Independent Independent Content creator

30 Prem Mistry Creative Director TVF Content creator

31 Raica Mathews Director OML Intermediary

32 Rajiv Mehra Co-founder Addatimes SVoD channel founder 33 Rohan Joshi Content Creator AIB Content creator

34 Saurav Kar Regional Content The Bong Guy Content creator Creator 35 Shantanu Chief Creative Revolt Art Technology Content creator Tungare Officer

36 Sidharth Jain Founder The Story Ink (Former Intermediary Hot Star) 265

37 Soumya General Manager Hoichoi SVoD Mukherjee – Operations executive 38 The Bong Guy Independent The Bong Guy (YouTube Content creator (Sourav Kar) channel)

39 Tracy D Souza Channel Head, TVF Content creator TVF Girliyapa 40 Trishan Founder Indian Casting Company Casting agent

41 Vaibhav Kumar Business Head Jio Cinema SVoD executive

42 Vishnu Mohta Co-founder Hoichoi SVoD executive 43 Indrani Biswas Independent Independent Content creator

44 Jyoti Das Independent Independent Content creator

45 Sidharth Marketing Netflix SVoD Ravindran Manager executive 46 Devashish Independent Independent Content creator Makhija 47 Rasika Duggal Independent Independent Actress in Netflix, Amazon Prime, TVF, YT, Bollywood content 48 Abhishek Co-founder Casting Bay Casting agent Banerjee 49 Sarang Sathaye BhaDiPa co- BhaDiPa Content creator founder

50 Sameer CEO, Cultural Cultural Machine Intermediary Pitalwala Machine 51 R. Madhavan Independent Independent Actor, producer 52 Aditi Mittal Independent Independent Content creator

53 Anirban Independent Independent Content creator Dasgupta – stand-up comedy, web series 54 Anup Kadam Producer Voot SVoD executive 55 Arunesh Kripal Senior Creative Qyuki Intermediary Producer 266

56 Atul Khatri Independent Independent Content creator

57 Nikunj Lotia Founder Be YouNick (YouTube) Content creator

58 Brahma Raval Founder Yo Yo Gujarati Content creator (YouTube) 59 Nikhil Taneja Head Y Films (YouTube) Content creator

60 Nijo Jonson Founder Purani Dilli Talkies Content creator (YouTube)

61 Sidharth Creative Head Times Internet Ltd Content creator Alambayan 62 Sidharth Independent Sidharth Dudeja Content creator Dudeja (YouTube channel)

63 Sorabh Pant Independent Sorabh Pant (YouTube Content creator channel)

64 Tanya Chamoli Independent Tanya Chamoli (YouTube Content creator channel)

65 Vaibhav Sethia Independent Vaibhav Sethia (YouTube Content creator channel)

66 Karandeep Independent Independent Content creator Jaiswal