SVF, at home in the world: Can it move successfully beyond West Bengal?

SVF eyes growth beyond Bengal with Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi bets, leveraging its integrated model as it tests scale in India's competitive content market

Leaving home is tough. But for Kolkata-based SVF Entertainment, the journey has begun well. Late in March, its Hindi show, Chiraiya landed on JioHotstar. Soon, this gripping look at marital rape in the Hindi heartland hit 10 million viewers. “That makes it the number two web series of 2026 so far, after Taskaree (Netflix),” says Shailesh Kapoor, founder and CEO, Ormax Media, a consulting firm. 

Some 30 years after it was born, SVF’s hunt for scale outside of the Bengali-language market seems to be going well. Chiraiya is an adaptation of its own Bengali hit, Sampurna (Hoichoi, 2022). 

SVF’s Chiraiya draws 10 million viewers in India, making it the number two web series of 2026 so far  Earlier this year, its first Gujarati film, Dharmesh Mehta’s Jai Kanhaiya Lal Ki did a business of about ₹4 crore. That is a good number for that language and market, say analysts. Its Punjabi film, Navanait Singh’s Singh vs Kaur2 is expected in April. And there is Sooper, which is a Hindi micro-drama app, and Logline AI Studios that helps content creators. 

All of this has happened in the last few months, and much of this action comes from SVF’s solid base in West Bengal. 

SVF closed FY 2026 with about ₹470 crore in revenue. The licensing of its 180-odd movies, hundreds of TV and streaming shows, and archival content brought in a hefty third of the ₹470 crore. This figure includes its biggest success in recent years - Hoichoi, a pay streaming app with a large footprint in Bangladesh that garnered ₹110 crore in revenue. The distribution and exhibition of films got ₹80 crore while the rest came from an array of businesses across digital cinema, music, and a talent and celebrity management agency. 

The number is not as impressive as, say, Maddock Films’ ₹1,042 crore or T-Series’ ₹2,952 crore (revenue: FY2025). But unlike the bigger Mumbai studios, SVF has been steady and profitable on its growth over the years. More importantly, none of the big studios in Mumbai or in the South have the kind of profitable backward and forward integration across the entertainment value chain that SVF has from films (production, distribution, exhibition), TV, music, and streaming (production and OTT). 

“It is one of the most integrated studios in India,” says one analyst. “Within the Bengali language market, SVF’s dominance is complete,” said Kapoor. 

This is where questions about its quest beyond West Bengal begin. 

Bigger play 

Rituparno Ghosh’s Chokher Bali (2003), Kaushik Ganguly’s Apur Panchali (2013) and Srijit Mukherji’s Ek Je Chhilo Raja (2018) are among the many critically acclaimed and award-winning films from the SVF stable. However, its bread and butter came from TV shows in Bengali and mass entertainers like Bandhan (2004), I Love You (2007) and Challenge (2009). 

That business faced its first major crisis about a decade back when box office takings started dropping. “We realised there’s something wrong,” said Mahendra Soni, cofounder and director of SVF Entertainment. Soni along with cofounder Shrikant Mohta took a long, hard look at past data. They discovered that the state was down from 400 cinema screens in 2000 to 140 in 2015. 

The bulk of the screens left were in Kolkata, a multilingual market that remained unaffected. But SVF’s mainstay is Bengali films — the big draw in small towns and villages where roughly 70 per cent of the state’s population lives. That is where screens had been shutting down, and none of the big chains were interested in going there. 

So SVF took matters into its own hands. It mapped the 23 districts of West Bengal and started building, managing or acquiring screens over the last decade. Bolpur, Krishnanagar, Narendrapur, Baruipur, Jalpaiguri, Durgapur, and Chinsurah are now among the 26 towns and 19 districts in West Bengal where it manages or owns (so far) 63 screens. 

These cinemas offer a pared down viewing experience at ₹99-250 per ticket. As the screen count rose, SVF’s share of the net box office collection in the state doubled. 

SVF is deeply embedded into the geography, business and culture of West Bengal. Its founders are based in Kolkata. Can it embed itself with as much intensity and success in other markets? 

The business case is clear. 

Puro Puri Eken, the eighth season of Eken Babu (a Bengali-language web series streaming on Hoichoi)

“The market for Bengali entertainment has been growing at very low levels, which is perhaps why SVF sees the need for expansion into other languages including Hindi,” said Kapoor. For instance, the box office for Bengali films has crossed ₹100 crore just once in the last decade — it usually hovers at between ₹50-80 crore. That is a tiny part of the ₹13,400 crore that all Indian films put together collected at the domestic box office in 2025. 

“For the last 30 years, our only thing was to reach out to every Bengali across the globe with entertainment. Now, based on that understanding, we want to become India’s topmost integrated studio, working in different languages,” said Soni. 

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The things that matter 

That is a tough ask — it needs both capital and management chops. While SVF has come to the notice of several investors, the founders don’t feel the need to raise capital. “Over the next couple of years we will experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. We are not doing it to please a shareholder. We are doing it to make sure that our value is increased and we are able to make a decent profit to run our business,” said Soni. 

He points to the two things SVF is banking on. 

One, its ability to tell a good story at the right cost. In a market littered with loss-making OTTs, Hoichoi has already broken even and is making a small profit. “From day one we have been focussed on bringing cash in and then spending it,” said Vishnu Mohta, cofounder Hoichoi, Logline AI Studios and executive director, SVF. 

Two, its people. “When you build a production company the first part is managing the creative people internally and outside. How do you manage a director, a cameraman or your creative director? How do you find them, get them to work, understand their weaknesses, work on their strengths. And then build content, an organisation and then a business on top of that. If I hire a CEO in, say, my cinema business, I will make sure that they also understand how to talk to a director or how to handle an actor,” said Soni. 

The ability to do that is what will stand SVF in good stead, he reckons. “We have not set a target (for other languages) in terms of numbers.

 

But our teams are ready. We have now at least 15 leaders within the company,” he said. 

For now, as one analyst pointed out, “it is a good beginning.”