In plain language: Few small players shaping streaming biz beyond Hindi

Kaand 2010 is based on the caste violence that rocked Mirchpur, Haryana, that year. To watch this Haryanvi series, streaming on Stage, you have to first pay ₹399 for a three-month subscription, and answer this multiple choice question: “What is your culture?” The options are Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, and Rajasthani – the three languages in which Stage claims to offer about 600 hours of programming currently. 

The hope is to expand it to 18 languages or dialects, including Maithili, Bundeli, Awadhi and Marathi, over the next five years, says the OTT platform’s cofounder and Chief Executive Officer Vinay Singhal. 

In March this year, Stage raised over ₹100 crore in a Series B funding round, led by Goodwater Capital, Blume Ventures, and others. The idea is to scale up from its current 4.4 million subscribers to 70-80 million. 

“Language OTT subscriptions have not been increasing for over a year. Therefore, what OTTs like Hoichoi, Stage and Aha do now is important,” says Shailesh Kapoor, CEO, Ormax Media, a Mumbai-headquartered media consultancy. 

This round of capital Stage raised points to the evolution of language OTTs. It is an expression of investor confidence in a smaller, focused space that now has a handful of established players. 

“Aha, Hoichoi, Stage have built viable paid subscription models by leveraging deep knowledge of local tastes and production ecosystems,” points out Mihir Shah, vice president, Media Partners Asia. 

Local and original 

In 2020, just a year after Stage, came Aha, a Telugu language streaming app, which now stands at 2.5 million subscribers. 

According to reports, Aha’s parent company, Arha Media and Broadcasting, had raised ₹500 crore from its promoters — real estate major My Home Group and Allu Aravind’s production house Geetha Arts — a couple of years back. It has added programming in Tamil and Kannada, and plans to add Malayalam soon. Arha closed the financial year ending March 2025 with ₹150 crore in revenue and will break even this year. 

“Language OTTs are going through the same growth curve as the rest of the streaming business,” says Ajit Thakur, director and cofounder of Aha. “People invested based on the highs that came during the pandemic, but that growth has gone. The business has to be built brick by brick, just like any other.”  

Hoichoi, a Bengali streaming app, has been doing that for over eight years. It has already broken even and is making a small profit on its ₹100 crore topline. “We are an independent firm funded by SVF Entertainment with no outside investment. From day one, we have been focused on bringing cash in and then spending it,” says Vishnu Mohta, co-founder of Hoichoi and executive director of SVF. Hoichoi declines to reveal its subscriber numbers. 

Content conundrum 

These brands hold strong in the ₹35,600 crore (ad plus pay) streaming video market where the growth of languages other than Hindi has been disappointing. 

  “With the exception of Bengali, the originals market in India is still Hindi driven,” says Kapoor.  

Ormax data shows that for the last three-plus years, two-thirds of the total originals made have been in Hindi, followed by Bengali, courtesy Hoichoi (see graphic). That is strange, given that non-Hindi languages have close to 50 per cent of the viewership share on television, and 25-30 per cent revenue share. Note that online video reaches 524 million people, while television reaches 900 million. 

This brings us to the second feature of this evolution: its texture. In the first 10 years of its growth, streaming was chasing the Hindi/English market. 

The Hindi market is bigger in size, and the creative ecosystem for Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam is better developed than those for other languages. Therefore, when Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and other big platforms started looking at regional languages, it was Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam they focused on. 

However, they soon discovered that, “the biggest driver of OTT consumption in the South is films,” says Kapoor. “About 70 per cent of the big southern hits are on Netflix and Prime Video. The rest are picked up by JioHotstar or SonyLIV. Local platforms cannot afford the big films,” he points out.  

That has meant little investment in local originals. “The five South Indian markets are fiercely local. To transcend that, you need something compelling,” says Sunder Aaron, managing partner, Locomotive Global, the firm behind the crime drama series Rana Naidu, among other shows. True that. Sun TV, Maa TV, Asianet and others invested in local stories for years before they hit serious numbers on TV. That is the focus that standalone language OTTs bring. (Star India acquired Asianet in 2008 and Maa TV in 2015) 

Many of the other language markets — Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Bengali, and Marathi — are bilingual. Hindi, with its sharper production values, is an easy substitute in these markets. To match the aesthetic of Hindi means pushing costs from, say, ₹1 lakh per episode to ₹10-15 lakh an episode. The ad revenues in these markets haven’t been able to support those costs. 

That brings us to the third point in this story of evolution: the clear control on costs and sense of revenues these players have demonstrated, largely because of pedigree. 

SVF, a major film production and distribution firm in east India, launched Hoichoi in 2017. Besides acquiring films, it makes about 30 shows a year. That brings its tally to 200 originals so far, making it, arguably, the largest producer of original content in India.  

Mohta operates on a simple principle: “A bulk of what we spend is on content.” 

At an average revenue per user of ₹800 per year, pay has been its engine of growth. “Subscriptions can profitably grow at a 20-30 per cent annually. However, to reach people who are not ready to commit to ₹1,000 every year, we are introducing coin-based micropayments for the more mainstream content like Hoichoi TV+ and audio series,” he says. 

Hoichoi’s film studio just released The Eken: Benaras e Bibhishika, the third film based on a popular detective character that is in its eighth season on Hoichoi. The idea is to do 3-4 such ‘digital-centric’ films for theatrical release. 

Much like Hoichoi, growth for language OTTs has to come from shows and strengths being expanded laterally — since the market for original Bengali or Telugu content, or most non-Hindi languages, is smaller. “We started as an SVoD (subscription video-on-demand). Over the last two years, we are looking at multiple monetisation models including advertising. We are also considering producing our own movies for theatrical [release],” says Thakur. 

 

The challenges 

At $39 billion in revenue and over 300 million subscribers globally, Netflix is the world’s benchmark pay service. Considering that it offers programming in 37 languages, what happens when it starts investing in, say, Bengali or Telugu shows with budgets that beat anything on offer? 

“This is a subscription service; so you need to have at least 40-50 pieces of programming every year — that is what it takes,” says Mohta. 

That kind of scale in just one niche is almost impossible to sustain. Analysts point out that Netflix will drop 26 pieces of originals from India this year against Hoichoi’s 25-plus for Bengali alone. Mohta reckons SVF’s focus over 30 years on one language — across films, television, and now streaming — is key. 

Thakur points to  another challenge: “The attention span of regular viewers is reducing rapidly.” 

The answer lies in making shorter, more immersive variants of programming. Those, however, are tougher to monetise. That will be the next stage of evolution.