With the original content play going great across the OTT market. Netflix plans to strengthen its original content even more and plans to spend INR 3,000 CR in 2019 and 2020 for the Indian market. Reed Hastings of Netflix revealed the plan at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Friday.
Netflix in the recent times has been on a hiring spree and according to Hastings there are close to 100 employees at its Mumbai, across marketing and support teams, and another 1,000 developing content in various capacities.
Hastings at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit also mentioned that these are in addition to a slew of licenced content it has been picking up—its partnerships include Karan Johar’s Dharmatic Entertainment and Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment.
Netflix is gearing up for its launch of horror anthology Ghost Stories, a sequel to last year’s Lust Stories, Ajay Devgn’s Tribhanga starring Kajol, Dibakar Banerjee’s Freedom and Atul Sabharwal’s Class of ’83, produced by Red Chillies.
Hastings also said that India will see huge investments in the coming years from both foreign players— such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and new entrants including Disney+ and Apple TV+—as well as local entities like Hotstar; which will lead to a lot more content catering to all needs and tastes, with binge-watching Indians becoming used to the idea of regularly checking streaming services for their latest offerings.
Hastings at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit said, “Our goal is to be better than anybody else at pleasing audiences and earning viewing from them,” The big successes from India this year have been the third season of romantic comedy Little Things, crime drama Delhi Crime and animation series Mighty Little Bheem, In fact, about 27 million homes outside India have watched Mighty Little Bheem.
Netflix introduced a mobile-only subscription plan at ₹199 a month in India, and it’s been getting good results from this subscription plan.
Hastings said the company plans to aggressively push the plan, the first mobile-specific option anywhere in the world.
Hastings also reiterated the need for over-the-top streaming (OTT) platforms to adopt a self-regulation model—something the ministry of information and broadcasting mentioned earlier last month.
