When local is universal: SonyLIV to launch Tamil Originals this month

SonyLIV's growth trajectory suggests that the formula that works in India is provincialism and Indianness without the crutches of imitating or replicating templates that have worked in other markets. (Image: Screen grab from 'Meme Boys' trailer/sonyLIV)

October 2020 was a milestone for India’s homegrown OTT SonyLIV, the digital streaming platform of Sony Entertainment Network—till then, a lumbering interface with just murmurs of appreciation for a few shows like Your Honour and Undekhi. Its association with Applause Entertainment, newly headed by one of India’s most successful television heads Sameer Nair, with the Hansal Mehta-led series Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story gave SonyLIV enough teeth to compete with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

Scam 1992 was SonyLIV’s propeller shaft. The series, based on the book The Scam: Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Away by Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basu, was a roaring success. Critics loved it. So did audiences. The Harshad Mehta scam had shocked Indians as well as piqued our collective imagination (the second instalment of Scam, based on the Telgi scam, will release this year).

SonyLIV had relaunched in June 2020 with a new mandate for more realistic, local, heartfelt stories—somewhat of an extension and reimagination of what Sony TV represented in Indian television programming through the 1990s and early 2000s. Scam 1992 was perfect relaunch material; it got SonyLIV 22 million viewers.

Exactly a year later, in October 2021, came Tabbar, a Hindi-Punjabi series directed by Ajitpal Singh about a police officer played brilliantly by Pawan Malhotra who tries to save his family from ruin against the backdrop of Punjab’s drug addiction epidemic.

The second season of Gullak, a series about a middle-class family’s tribulations by The Viral Fever (TVF), got SonyLIV accolades for its authentic portrayal of middle-class India, in what seemed almost like a throwback to some 1980s’ Doordarshan soaps about little family joys, sorrows and platitudes.

The subscriber base kept growing. In the beginning of 2022, Rocket Boys, an engaging series about Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Bhabha, the two men who were key drivers of India’s nuclear energy and space programmes, created in collaboration with Roy Kapur Films and Emmay Entertainment, consolidated SonyLIV’s rising creative and intellectual equity further.

Building on this momentum after the peak of the pandemic, SonyLIV diversified its content beyond acquiring big Bollywood films. Many films from the Southern states made it to its roster, which soon got them more and more subscribers.

In the beginning of June, two years after its relaunch, SonyLIV had 18.2 million subscribers, making it India’s second largest subscription driven video-on-demand or SVoD service after Disney + Hotstar—about three times the size of Netflix, and ahead of Amazon Prime Video. Sony Pictures and SonyLIV have had one of the most successful financial years in 2022. The digital business alone registered a 65 percent jump in revenues, and SonyLIV closed March 2022 with Rs1,200 crore in revenue and a healthy operating profit.

Danish Khan, head, SonyLIV, Sony Entertainment Television and Studio Next, who has been at the centre of this spectacular revival, says, “We did see this shift coming because we had stalled the release of around 60 shows when the pandemic hit. Our focus with the relaunch was to do very local Indian stories for discerning audiences, and it is a sensibility that has worked for us.”

One of the greatest disadvantages that OTT platforms have had in India is the lack of content penetration in smaller towns. Netflix content is global, niche and clearly targeted at an urban audience base. Amazon Prime Video viewership is wider but its singularity is its plurality—it has something for everyone. For the first time, with SonyLIV’s new reach, an OTT platform has figured out what it takes to garner a pan-Indian audience, attuned to appreciating shows based on quintessentially Indian experiences and history.

Though a bulk of its shows are in Hindi, over a third of SonyLIV’s subscribers are from South India. Over the next six months, SonyLIV will be rolling out Malayalam, Telugu, and a slate of Tamil originals. “Once we have originals in those languages, 55-60 percent subscribers will come from the South,” says Khan.

Regional content is a big driver for subscription in Indian OTTs, and SonyLIV realised this potential early on. “The OTT space has made diversity of content a reality. Regional content, which has local stories and flavours, but has universal resonance, is a way forward. And this is a market that only OTT technology has made possible for the first time in India. Bollywood and Hindi are no longer the only segments that work,” says Khan.

The Tamil Originals will start with Meme Boys, a Rainshine Studios production, with Guru Somasundaram, Badava Gopi, Aadhitya Bhaskar, Siddharth Babu, Jayanth, Namritha and Nikhil Nair in the cast, and directed by Arun Koushik. It is about a group of college students who are friends—three boys and a girl—who run an unidentified meme page mocking their oppressive college administration at a time when a college-wide revolution is on its way to disrupt the status-quo. The series will drop on the platform on July 22.

Next on the Tamil Originals slate are Tamil Rockerz, about the eponymous piracy group of Tamil Nadu and its plan to leak a hugely anticipated movie, which puts Rudra, a police officer with a complicated past, on the group’s trail—he must fight against time, unruly fans and an anonymous networks of cyber pirates to rescue the movie. Kaiyum Kalavum is about a compulsive thief and an unlucky pickpocket who bond over serendipitous events. Victim: Who is Next is a Tamil anthology—to be helmed by directors Venkat Prabhu, Pa Ranjith, M. Rajesh, and Chimbu Devaabout—that hinges on the idea of victimhood and how a section of society is always vulnerable to it.

Besides its Tamil slate, SonyLIV will roll out Sudhir Mishra’s Tanaav, a socio-political drama set in Kashmir, Nikkhil Advani’s political thriller based on Freedom At Midnight, the book by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, Dr Arora, a “dramedy” about a travelling sex consultant, and Onir’s series based on Rahul Pandita’s book The Lover Boy of Bahawalpur about the Pulwama tragedy.

Danish Khan, head, SonyLIV, Sony Entertainment Television and Studio Next.

With Viacom 18 winning the digital telecast rights of the Indian Premier League, both Hotstar and SonyLIV have lost a significant chunk of sports viewership. But, Khan says, “we have the rights to telecast every Indian cricket series besides the IPL and we have the rights for two tennis grand slams, the French Open and the Australian Open. In soccer, the UFC and the Uefa have done brilliantly for us.”

Soon after the IPL contract went to Viacom 18, SonyLIV announced a tie-up with telecom operator Vi to introduce a SonyLIV Premium add-on pack for the telco’s Postpaid Users. “Sports content will cover a monthly pack. People subscribe for a month for a particular sport, that’s it. But the numbers are high on such days,” Khan said.

This is also the year, Khan says, SonyLIV will test its strategy for unscripted and non-fiction programming, which he says, has huge potential. “In India, we are still grappling with how to position non-fiction content beyond reality shows.”

This is the moment the OTT world is exploding with possibilities in India. By the end of March, India had 97 million OTT subscribers, said a report by Media Partners Asia. It is one of the fastest-growing OTT markets with revenues of over Rs 17,000 crore in 2021. Of this, subscriptions accounted for roughly Rs 5,200 crore. Its turnaround makes SonyLIV a serious player in this market.

Being bullish about regional content, especially stories from the South, gives SonyLIV the extra advantage, especially since the merger between Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd’s (ZEE) and Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN) is reported to be final (neither Khan nor any Zee representative commented on the status of the merger) and awaiting regulatory clearances. The Zee-Sony branding will create a regional content giant in India’s media and entertainment space. The combined entity will have 75 linear TV channels, two streaming services—SonyLIV and Zee5—and two film studios. Media analysts predict that Zee’s investments in regional markets like Tamil, Telugu and Punjabi will help Sony gain strength in wider markets while Sony’s prowess in segments like sports and entertainment will help Zee. Today, nearly 50 percent of  Zee5’s viewership comes from regional language content.

The next phase of SonyLIV and reach of homegrown OTTs can have lessons for global brands like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video on the hows and whys of regional and country-specific content that gets not just eyeballs from influencers and elite audiences, but expanding subscriber bases. The formula, as the SonyLIV growth story suggests, is provincialism and Indianness without the crutches of imitating and replicate templates that have worked in other markets—provincial content that smacks of universality—a combination that seems to have eluded the global brands in the past five years.