By Shailesh Kapoor
Three weeks ago, I wrote about the path ahead of the streaming category in India here. While that piece focused on content quality, there’s another important area that’s crucial to the growth of the SVOD category in India: Piracy.
Piracy has plagued the Indian entertainment business for long. It was VCR-enabled piracy in the 80s and the 90s that impacted the theatrical business severely. As satellite television business mushroomed in India, piracy of cable connections as well as under-reporting on subscriber base by the last-mile operator led to huge leakage of subscription revenues, till the time digitization was brought in (one of the areas where TRAI’s involvement has been a definite plus) a few years ago.
While all entertainment businesses will continue to face some form of piracy at any time, the latest story on the horizon here is about the new kid on the block: SVOD. Let’s understand this through an example.
In our estimate, Scam 1992 (Sony Liv) has been watched (at least one episode) by 23 million people in India already. In a recent official statement in a promotional TOI supplement created around the success of the show, it was confirmed that Sony Liv is at the 2 mn paid subscribers mark now. Even if one assumes that all these 2 mn are in India and that all of them have watched Scam 1992, that’s still 21 mn unaccounted-for viewers. One can argue that Scam 1992 is fairly family-inclusive (compared to other web-series anyway), and would have been watched by 3-4 members of a family, either individually or together, on the same subscription. At an average of 3.5, it comes to 7 mn viewers through paid accounts. That still leaves 16 mn, i.e., 70% of the total viewer base, unexplained. Yes, there could be some free trials contributing to this 16 mn too, but that’s unlikely to be sizeable.
The explanation is not too complex. There are three sources through which such ‘pirated’ viewing happens. The first is perhaps legally valid: Password sharing. In India, password sharing for OTT apps is fairly rampant, especially among teenagers and youth, as they try and extract the maximum value from their limited pocket moneys. But this aspect creates inconvenience, because many subscription packs do not allow for simultaneous viewing on multiple screens.
This is where the other two modus operandi come in, both of which are blatantly illegal: Pirated downloads and file sharing. Both these are connected, in that the starting point of both these methods is a ripped copy of content making its way into the public domain. This is not very different from how we understand torrents. But now, it happens through apps that are often downloaded for this specific reason. There are many, and one of them is a fairly established messenger app too (Telegram). A simple search for your favorite show/ film on such apps will tell you how easy it is to find a good-quality pirated copy.
It seems that the streaming industry is now becoming aware of the scale of this issue. But so far, there has been very little action that one has seen. The most obvious starting point is viewer awareness and persuasion. Remember those ads at the start of movie screenings and video cassettes, where film stars appealed audience not to watch pirated films?
In our reading, 3 out of 5 people who download or view pirated content through such sites and apps do not know it is illegal! And those who know have no understanding of its impact on the industry that feeds them their entertainment. And of course, there’s no fear of getting caught in an illegal act anyway. So, there’s a long way to go on viewer awareness itself.
One cannot bring such things down to nil. But there can definitely be a reduction in scale. If the SVOD category is making only 30% of what it deserves based on the Scam 1992 example above, imagine what the boost can be if it goes up to just 50%. That’s 67% growth from an inorganic factor!
One hopes that the I&B ministry, under whom the industry now comes, takes this up as a top agenda item. For that, leading platforms will do well to pitch in with their share of lobbying.