Netflix turns to Bollywood to take on Amazon Prime in Indian market

Netflix premiered its first original series in India in a sheen of Bollywood glitter on Wednesday, upping the stakes in its battle with streaming rival Amazon Prime for a chunk of the country’s more than one billion potential viewers.

The success of original US shows like House of Cards, Orange is the New Black and Stranger Things has been at the heart of Netflix’s seduction of 125 million subscribers globally. But like other US entertainment firms, it has identified the need to create local content as important in winning viewers in some of the big emerging markets which are likely to dominate growth over the next decade. 

A Hindi-language thriller, Sacred Games launches less than a month after the success of its Indian film Lust Stories and comes at a time when fellow US heavyweights Comcast and Walt Disney are vying for control of Tata Sky as part of their fight for Twenty-First Century Fox. Both Lust Stories and Sacred Games seek to marry the Western styles and values that exposure to Netflix and Amazon has brought to youth with the rich and varied output of the country’s domestic film industry.