Of OTT, TV and future

Ever since Corona burst into limelight, there had been murmurs around similar incident-based themes ruling the storylines across all “woods” for time to come. OTT has seriously taken to Virus attacks as a theme and with “Kaalapaani” being a runaway hit, obviously it has spawned many such similar story lines. The recent one being PI Meena on Prime. What starts as a hit and run case, very quickly morphs into bio terror plot with the perps stretching all the way across Eastern and Northern India till Middle east Asia and beyond. Another noteworthy thing that has happened since the dawn of OTT being, newer and nascent locales in India are being explored for very first time. There are so many series coming up and running already, that are based on the far neglected Eastern side of the Indian subcontinent. Even character wise NE Indians hardly found proper representation for they didn’t just look different than those from mainland and rest of the country, but their cultures were distinctly different than rest. But with so many of them getting repetitive and plum roles across series, with them becoming familiar faces across the nation, it invariably brings the much-needed spotlight to their native, culture and region as well. Another good aspect of OTT being the liberty that the storytellers have in deciding the length and scope of their stories. They can have an hour-long episode of half a dozen each or make it a 30 minute one of several episodes or even break it into 45 mins of couple of episodes depending on how dense they want to present their story across each episode or how long the provider wants to milk the viewership. While it was all launched in one shot previously, nowadays, OTT providers are launching fresh episodes on a weekly basis, turning them into sitcoms of yesteryear. Binge watching was what made OTT”s famous but with viewership war full on, each of them are trying to tie down their viewership populace in every manner possible. Ads have increased without any measure and at times the ads themselves run for 5 mins at a stretch. Skip ad’s are such a relief but can provide only so much of a breather. With Reliance in talks to take over Disney, it wouldn’t just be a gamechanger for OTT space but interestingly, if the tv channels are also bundled together, it would give a lot more clout than what he already possesses to Mr. Ambani, who would literally have monopoly over majority of shiny surfaces that show moving images!! If I may make a prediction, in ten year’s time, we may witness the boom of wall mounted VR gaming consoles which may’ve fast replaced TV”s. News and entertainment related programs are almost already relegated to mobiles and unless an even smaller handheld alternate is not found by that time, mobiles would’ve completely replaced regular TV which would’ve any way lost out to AI VR gaming consoles. 5G speed may be so passe that people may be cribbing about how slow their Terabyte provider are and could be considering moving to Sat based setups like Starlink!! Interesting times ahead!