Our Funarena!

During the ongoing age of the pandemic there’s been hardly any activity concerning the big screens and the new hot weekly releases, and movie buffs really miss the coveted visits to the theatres. However, if one is not so much strained about watching movies on computers or on mobile screens then one can still have lots of enriched watching on the OTT (Over The Top) platforms that stream a rich variety of movies from world cinema apart from their much-publicized web series. There’s a concern no doubt for harming your ear drums with continuous use of the headphones; but one can be judiciously selective about it. During such a restrained and judicious practice of wearing the headphones this writer has come across various movies and web series that really kept alive his cinema-appreciation instincts. One such movie is The Wailing (2016), a South Korean (officially the Republic of Korea) horror film, written and directed by the celebrated award-winning South Korean director Na Hong-jin who

  I have been a movie buff since my childhood days, also so passionate about it that I wanted to be a filmmaker and did indeed try in that direction to some extent, still nurturing that ambition. And I always enjoyed the movies on the big screens including those silver screens of the traditional single-screen cinema halls of yore that fitted ideally the 35mm film format and whenever the occasional 70mm films came the frames used to spill over to the sides. I find this very tragic, of course no match to the horrors and sufferings of people due to the pandemic, that for over 18 months now I’ve been deprived of the normal cinema theatre visits and really missing the action. The OTT (Over the Top) streaming platforms thus have become the only alternative, for people like me who puts the entire focus on COVID-19 appropriate behaviour and safety. Therefore, I’ve been watching a lot on such a platform since the first lockdown—always selecting the best of movies available and the most-talked a

It seems, reasonably enough, that the outrage was waiting to happen. The growth of the Over-the-top media services platforms (OTT) that distribute video streaming over the internet, has been tremendous in the last eight years in India; in 2018 its market worth was more than INR 21.5 billion which has grown to INR 35 billion in 2019 and it is around INR 40 billion now. The market worth is expected to grow at the exponential rate of 45% to reach around INR 138 billion in 2023 and over 158 billion in 2024. The platforms enjoy a viewership of more than 1.7 billion subscribers currently which is likely to rise to a whopping 5 billion this year, making it the second-biggest OTT market after the US. Except for Reliance Entertainment’s launch of BigFix in 2008, the biggest of the 40-odd OTT platforms like SonyLIV, Disney-Hotstar, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Voot, JioCinema and Zee5 started operations in India during 2013-18.   Initially, the OTT platforms were streaming released feature films,