PremiumNEW DELHI: Building on its recent initiative to ramp up Tamil and Telugu language content, SonyLIV, the video streaming platform owned by Sony Pictures Networks India will premiere Tamil festival favourite Thaen.
Directed by Ganesh Vinayakan and produced by Ambalavanan.B, Prema.P and AP Productions, Thaen has been screened and has scored nominations at festivals such as Indian Panorama 2020, Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival, Ayodhya Film Festival, among others. It will be also be available in Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada.
“Thaen is a carefully crafted tale that delves into a subject rarely talked about in cinema. Through these gripping and informative stories of India with real-life relevance, our goal is to resonate with the audience and showcase content which has the power to shift perceptions," Ashish Golwalkar, head, content, SET and digital business said in a statement. The film tells the story of an educated young rural man and the challenges he faces.
To be sure, media experts agree video streaming services will have to continue to focus on local language, original content across vernacular languages if they wish to penetrate deeper into the Indian heartland. According to the annual media and entertainment report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) along with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), 35-40% of the consumption on OTT services happens in local languages and the hours of original programming that has tripled between 2018 and 2020, now stands at 1,400-1,800, as of 2020, across services.
While foreign services like Netflix and Amazon are dabbling with Tamil, Telugu and other regional language originals, homegrown OTT service ZEE5 released almost two originals per month across Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and Kannada over the past few months. Plus there has been consolidation and advent of language-focused services such as Hoichoi (Bengali), aha Video (Telugu) or Letsflix (Marathi). The focus on regional languages makes sense given that the share of rural India had grown 23% to make up 52% of all Internet users in the country by March 2020, according to the report.
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