Streaming giant Netflix generated a $2-billion economic impact from its India investments in three years, the company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on Saturday, highlighting how the firm had leveraged the country’s digital potential after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking at the Waves Summit in Mumbai, Sarandos said the company had created 20,000 cast and crew jobs from its productions in India between 2021 and 2024, stepping up its effort after things got back to normal post-pandemic.
“India is at the cusp of a huge inflection point for a storyteller, the way Squid Game was for (South) Korea,” Sarandos said during a fireside chat with actor Saif Ali Khan. “Local productions have allowed us to stay committed to local storytelling,” he added.
Netflix, which began local productions in India with Sacred Games about seven years ago, has since produced around 150 original films and series, filming across 90 different cities in the country. The post-Covid digital surge has seen the streaming giant focus more on Indian content, as the firm eyes growth in the domestic market, as well as from the Indian diaspora across the world.
For instance, Sarandos said people watched about 3 billion hours of Indian content on Netflix around the world in the past year, which translated to about 60 million hours a week. He added that an Indian title had even made it to the company’s global top 10 charts recently.
“We have been operating in India now for nine years. But we took our big swing seven years ago with Sacred Games. I knew that India would be a very important part of our journey,” Sarandos, 60, said.
Sarandos added that great stories transcend borders, languages and cultures. “They talk to the world. I’m just so endlessly thrilled to work with the creative community in India,” he said.
Sarandos also believes streaming and theatrical releases can co-exist, especially in India, which produces the most number of films in the world at 2,000.
“India is probably one of the more fan-centric places that enables this to happen because they don’t get into these debates about how long the (theatrical) windows will need to be. I think that is a very big debate in a few countries around the world. I assure you that nobody, except for distributors, are talking about windows,” he said.
Sarandos also said streaming had allowed small films to find an audience, which was a big shift in the Indian movie market, since digital viewership had gathered pace. “Streaming can deliver movies that are very obscure. It isn’t about one big movie, but different movies that you can pick for the night,” he said.
Writing, he noted, had become sharper on OTT over the years, which allowed for better character development and non-linear story telling.
“Streaming has got to the audience wherever he or she is. That is the most exciting part of the business,” he said.