Amazon Prime to shake things up in South India with original content

Streaming giant Amazon Prime Video is planning an aggressive slate of original content launches for the southern market to meet the growing demand amid increasing popularity for dubbed South Indian content across the country.

On Tuesday, Prime Video launched the trailer of the original series, Suzhal – The Vortex, in Chennai. The Tamil thriller, which has an ensemble of characters, including Kathir, Aishwarya Rajesh and Sriya Reddy, along with Radhakrishnan Parthiban, will stream in India and across 240 countries and territories from June 17.

“This [Suzhal] is just a tip of the iceberg. We have a very robust slate of shows in development and a very prolific local team on the ground working with multiple creators in Telugu and Tamil. We are also planning to expand into Malayalam and Kannada,” Aparna Purohit, Head India Originals, Amazon Prime Video, India, told BusinessLine.

Speaking ahead of the trailer launch event, Purohit said Tamil Nadu is a prolific and old entertainment market and that the audiences here are extremely passionate about their stars and content.

Written and created by Pushkar and Gayatri and directed by Bramma and Anucharan M, the eight-episode investigative drama is about the disappearance of a school girl and a chain of events it creates in a small industrial town. Suzhal is the first original Tamil content to be dubbed in over 30 Indian and International languages. It will premiere across in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu and English, as well as foreign languages such as French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish and Portuguese to name a few.

“The launch of the show in so many languages is testament to the fact that we really believe this is a great show and audiences across the globe will love it,” said Purohit.

Purohit said 50 per cent of the audience for any original film on the platform comes from outside their native States, and one out of every five viewers of originals in the platform are from outside India.

“It’s such a beautiful thing that a Malayalam film is being watched in Punjab and Tamil films are being watched in Gujarat. So, those barriers of languages and geographies are blurring and the linguistic palette of the audience keeps expanding,” said Purohit.

In April, the over-the-top (OTT) platform announced that it will double investment in the country and release 41 new titles over a period of 24 months.

Purohit said several of these upcoming contents will be focussed on the southern market. “We have some big plans and we have already announced Telugu original film Ammu, actor Arya’s The Village (Tamil), actor Naga Chaitanya’s Dhootha (Telugu), Modern Love Chennai, among others,” she added.

Purohit added that it typically takes 1.5-2 years from the concept development stage to finally taking the content to the audience. “That’s the kind of creative investment we put behind every show,” said Purohit. The Hindu BusinessLine