Demand for Original Content is Surging: Danish Khan

SonyLIV, Sony Pictures Networks India's (SPN) video-streaming platform, plans to invest heavily in original content - around 60 shows and 36 movies per year - across languages to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for content from OTT (over-the-top) users in India.

“I think the demand for original content far exceeds the supply that we have today. On an average, all the major OTT players put together are not putting up more than 10 shows per month, which is around 100 hours of content. For a country as large and as diverse as ours, I think there's a huge amount of potential for more content and variety of content,” Danish Khan, executive vice president and business head of SonyLIV told Economic Times.

He confirmed that SonyLIV will release approximately 60 shows per year. Khan said, "We will do approximately 18-20 series in Hindi, with the remainder in other languages, primarily Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, and Punjabi. We'll have five new releases in about a month. There will also be three regional films, for a total of 36 films in three languages."

With an average cost of around Rs 30 crore for one Hindi web-series and Rs 15 crore for regional, the company is expected to spend over Rs 1,500 crore on content alone.