In 2005, Aditya Birla Group’s film studio Applause Entertainment co-produced Amitabh Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee starrer ‘Black’, a Hindi feature film. While it did well, the Birlas decided to move away from the production business. In 2017, the group hired Sameer Nair and revived the studio. Since then, Applause Entertainment has played its part in growing the Indian digital video ecosystem.
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Nair, CEO, Applause Entertainment, joined the studio with the ambition of creating premium dramas for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar and the like. So far, as many as four shows are streaming on Hotstar, one on Amazon Prime Video (‘Mind The Malhotras’), ‘Hello Mini’ on MX Player and Tamil show ‘Iru Dhuruvam’ on SonyLIV. Within a span of two years, the studio has already managed to market around 10 shows which are at various stages of postproduction, and has several more in the pipeline.
This business of making shows, for the small screen, and then selling them to video-on-demand (VOD) platforms is relatively new in India. Historically, television broadcasters like Star, Zee, Sony, commissioned shows to production houses like Balaji Telefilms, Swastik, etc. – the risk was undertaken by the broadcaster and, in return, the broadcaster owned the intellectual property forever. That’s how the ecosystem was designed. However, studios like Applause create shows themselves – and with it, comes the risk and the reward.
Before joining Applause, Nair was group CEO at Balaji Telefilms; it was during his tenure that the group launched its VOD platform ALTBalaji. Nair started his broadcast journey with Star India in 1994 as its first programming head and is credited with shaping Indian television. At Star India, where he went on to become the CEO, he was closely involved with fortune-turning shows like ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’ and the ‘K’ series - ‘Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki’, ‘Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’, ‘Kasauti Zindagi Kay’.
In 2006, he joined Prannoy Roy’s NDTV to lead the then new general entertainment business; he was the CEO of NDTV Imagine, a channel that never really found its stride. Of late, Nair has pivoted towards making movies, documentaries and shortform fiction.
Edited Excerpts:
“In the early ’90s, when the television business was being built, we were creating content but at the same time, we were also laying cables for distribution. In the OTT world, distribution is already in place – in fact, content is playing catch up to distribution.”
Sameer Nair
“In this content business, everything is competition. The biggest competition for OTT platforms is something like TikTok. It’s about fighting for peoples’ time; the more time they spend on social media, the less time they have to consume a series.”
Sameer Nair
Editor's Note:
“ The future of content is, increasingly, a war for your attention, your time, your money, in that order...”
That’s a line from a 2017 TEDx talk by Sameer Nair, CEO of Applause Entertainment, a content and IP creation studio. Nair started out wanting to become an astronaut, ended up studying hotel management, and somehow landed up in the Indian media and entertainment space, where he spent over three decades and created one of the deepest dents on the business, especially during his time at Star. Credited with making saas-bahu soaps a staple for viewers of Indian television and for bringing Kaun Banega Crorepati into our lives and vocabulary, Nair is now preoccupied with creating “premium drama” content for the modern day consumer. Premium cinematic television, as he calls it, is a genre of content that India, unlike the West, has skipped. That’s the gap he is looking to fill, online.
While Arianna Huffington routinely implores us, through her speeches and books, to sleep adequately and on time, Nair concedes that the content business is rivalled by not competing studios or platforms but “everything else”, like going to the theatre for a movie or to a restaurant for dinner, and... sleeping. One of the existential questions we face today is: Should I watch the next episode or go to bed? I recall author Chetan Bhagat saying something similar, years back, in the context of books and how they compete with anything that makes demands on a potential reader’s precious leisure time and finite attention.
For this interview, Nair welcomed our reporter into his spacious Pali Hill home at Bandra, Mumbai. Though he refused to wear a suit for the shoot - “I’ve never been a suit person, you know...” - he, with a lot of help from the missus, indulged the whims of our photographers, with a smile. Pause the show you’re binge-ing, sit back and enjoy this detailed interview.
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