How language streaming services Hoichoi, Aha shake up entertainment market

Eken Babu is an unlikely detective. The rotund, balding character was created in 1991 by the late author Sujan Dasgupta for Bengali magazine Anandamela. Eken Babu became a web series on Hoichoi, a Bengali streaming service, in 2018. The show is now in its eighth season. Eken Babu’s popularity prompted Hoichoi’s parent, SVF Entertainment, a major studio and distributor based in Kolkata, to produce a film featuring the character in 2022. This May saw the release of the third film in the franchise, Eken: Benaras e Bibhishika. Hoichoi, a subscription-based service, which launched in 2017, now makes a small profit on its ₹100 crore top line (FY 2024-25).

 

In Hyderabad, Aha, a Telugu streaming app birthed by real estate major My Home Group, and Allu Aravind’s Geetha Arts, will break even this year on its ₹150 crore top line. It has 2.5 million subscribers. Stage, another OTT, just raised over ₹100 crore in a Series B funding round as it tries to scale from its claimed 4.4 million subscribers to 70-80 million. It offers programming in Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, and Rajasthani with plans to add 18 more dialects/languages, including Maithili, Bundeli, Awadhi, and Marathi.

 

The numbers seem small. In 2024, streaming video generated ₹35,600 crore in advertising and pay revenues from 125 million subscribers, according to Media Partners Asia. So a couple of million subscribers and a few hundred crore in top line doesn’t seem much.

 

It is for two reasons — history and profitability.

 

Take history. Streaming is following the same growth trajectory as television. Private television broadcasting took off in India in 1991 with the entry of Star TV and CNN. Zee entered the scene in 1992, and soon after came the first Tamil channel, Kalanithi Maran’s Sun TV, in 1993. Ramoji Rao’s Eenadu TV (Telugu) launched in 1995. Zee Marathi, Asianet (Malayalam), Maa TV (Telugu), and many others followed. Except for Zee, none of the big broadcasters got into non-Hindi immediately.

 

That is because, in both value and volume, Hindi is the largest part of the media and entertainment pie, given it is spoken in large swathes of India. Its creative ecosystem was better developed, thanks to cinema and Doordarshan. Buniyaad or Katha Sagar, among other popular shows from the ’80s, were made by people making films. Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam were the other languages with well-developed creative ecosystems — with writers, filmmakers, technicians — who could create for a new audience on television. So those languages took off after Hindi.

 

Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam were limited by the fact that each of those languages is spoken by only 5-10 per cent of the people who speak Hindi. But funnily enough, Sun TV was the most-watched channel in India across languages for decades. Just after the pandemic, Dangal TV displaced it. Sun, Maa TV, and a bunch of others routinely feature in the top 10 most-watched TV channels in India. This is because many Northern states never managed the 80-90 per cent cable TV penetration that Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana) had. On TV, those three languages are reaching almost their entire audience — Hindi isn’t.

  Consider other languages. Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Bengali or Marathi audiences 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 per episode. The ad and pay revenues in these markets couldn’t support those costs. That explains why attempts by both independent and large networks in these languages simply didn’t work while investment into South Indian languages did. Star, Viacom18, and Zee did get into Punjabi and Gujarati, among other languages, but with limited success.  

That brings this to the second reason why the slow, steady march of a Hoichoi or Aha is interesting. They are profitable businesses, at a scale a non-Hindi language business can be, and they are sustainable by virtue of being part of a bigger entity. For instance, Hoichoi’s parent, SVF, has been focussed on Bengali cinema and television for 30 years now, much like Sun TV has been in Tamil or Eenadu was in Telugu. Think of this — in 2025, Netflix has a slate of 26 shows and films from India: Hoichoi has 25 only for Bengali.

 

By the turn of the millennium, many large broadcasters scaled and expanded their language offering by buying strongly entrenched local players. Star bought both Asianet (2009) and Maa TV (2015). Today, non-Hindi languages typically bring close to 25-30 per cent of the total revenue for most broadcasters. If the growth of language television is anything to go by, then at some point in the future, brands like Hoichoi and Aha could become highly valued takeover targets when the big platforms try to bulk up revenues and get their non-Hindi businesses going. History, as they say, repeats itself.

 

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