SonyLIV to stream new Tamil anthology ‘Kasadabatara’ on 27 August
Premium- SonyLIV has been building on its regional content library and had recently premiered Tamil festival favourite Thaen
New Delhi: SonyLIV, the video streaming service owned by Sony Pictures Networks India will start streaming a Tamil language anthology titled Kasadabatara on 27 August. It has been written and directed by Chimbu Deven and stars Harish Kalyan, Sundeep Kishan, Regina Cassandra, Priya Bhavani Shankar, Vijayalakshmi, Shanthanu, Premji, Venkat Prabhu, and others in lead roles.
Like other foreign and local streaming services, SonyLIV has been building on its regional content library and had recently premiered Tamil festival favourite Thaen. To be sure, all 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 a December 2020 media and entertainment report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) along with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), 35-40% of the consumption of OTT services happens in local languages. It said that streaming services have tripled original content in Indian languages between 2018 and 2020 which stood at 1,400-1,800 hours per annum in 2020.
While foreign services like Netflix and Amazon are dabbling in Tamil, Telugu and other regional language originals, homegrown OTT service ZEE5 released almost two originals per month across Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and Kannada in 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.
OTT platforms like Netflix and Amazon have been betting big on anthologies across languages for a few months now, with shows such as Paava Kadhaigal, Pitta Kathalu, Navarasa, Ajeeb Daastaans, Ray, Unpaused and Putham Pudhu Kaalai.
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