Will Gujaratis Pay To Be Entertained?

Call it unfortunate or good for mainstream business, but states like Gujarat have a large consumer base for Hindi language entertainment. Despite a long history of theatre, cinema, music and other performing arts, Gujarati language entertainment remains a low priority for India’s biggest streaming platforms. Besides, several mainstream films and TV shows are set in the Gujarati milieu, such as the movies of director Sanjay Leela Bhansali and the erstwhile ‘K-serials’ of the 2000s made by TV legend Ekta Kapoor.

Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other top-tier streaming services have poured money into Tamil and Telugu entertainment, garnished with an occasional title in Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi or Bengali. Gujarati doesn’t figure on most lists.

Yet, there are people investing in original Gujarati films and web series. Some are even betting that viewers will pay to stream.

Regional Ambitions

Hindi film actor Ajay Devgan’s latest Hindi film Shaitaan was a moderate success at the box office. The film was a remake of the Gujarati horror hit Vash. That’s not his first link to Gujarati entertainment. Last year, he launched the trailer of Gujarati film Hu Ane Tu in Mumbai. And in 2017 he set up NY Cinemas, a chain of affordable theatres for small towns, including Bhuj and Surendranagar in Gujarat.

Yet, Gujarati cinema isn’t a money spinner. In 2023, Gujarati films had lower box office collections than the previous year due to fewer footfalls.

But for Saurabh Srivastava, Shemaroo Entertainment’s chief operating officer (digital), Gujarati entertainment is an opportunity waiting for someone patient.

“In Gujarat, nobody made an attempt because it is well-served by Hindi content,” he told The Impression. “The fruit is not hanging low unlike other regional languages’ markets. You get instant play as soon as you create an app or a TV channel in a south Indian language or in Bengali or Marathi. In Gujarat, you don’t., For big Hindi channels like Star Plus and Bollywood theatrical collections, Gujarat is already a big market.” 

Yet, the company’s streaming service ShemarooMe has doubled down on Gujarati, offering movies and web series, that too behind paywall. Vash, the movie Ajay Devgan remade, is a ShemarooMe exclusive online. In the quarter ended March 2024, the platform released 13 new Gujarati titles, including films, web series, and plays (pdf).

Srivastava argues that high consumption of Hindi entertainment doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no hope for Gujarati entertainment. “Some stories which will require regional languages to have a soul and be powerful,” Srivastava said. “We think there is a huge scope for Gujarati in that.” He cites the example of the 2019 National Award winning film Hellaro, about the struggle of a group of women to perform the traditional garba against the wishes of the men in their village. “Yes, this story can be made in Hindi also but we think it won’t be as powerful or strong in that language. It is so entrenched in the [Gujarati] language and culture.”

When Indian streaming boomed during the pandemic, several platforms dedicated to Gujarati language entertainment hit the market, including CityShor and OHO Gujarati.

But cultivating an audience that is perfectly fine watching their stories and culture in Hindi is an uphill task. That would explain why streaming majors such as Netflix and Amazon have largely stayed away from big releases in the language.

That may not be the only thing holding them back from Gujarati investments.

Money and Stars

“This [the Gujarati entertainment business] is not a big profit-making industry just yet,” says Mahendra Sharma, founder and CEO of Ahmedabad-based publishing and entertainment platform Matrubharti. “It is very difficult to make and sell your own content and also promote your own platform. Getting your app downloaded is a big, big challenge. And then after downloading, most people are not ready to pay. Consumers are ready to spend money on ‘branded’ content, meaning bigger projects with a big star and a recognisable face.”

Given the dominance of Hindi film stars in north and west India, there are no similarly big faces in the Gujarati film and TV industry yet. Besides, the Indian consumer’s low propensity to pay for online goods is well-known (read more in this edition of The Impression).

Matrubharti’s Sharma argues that even today, a Gujarati viewer is more likely to spend money on theatre tickets for a big budget Hindi film with a star than on the latest Gujarati release. Some Gujarati titles have made a small profit, but that was possible because they received some funding from the state of Gujarat and kept their budget to a tight Rs 1-2 crore. “We are also not getting any instant recovery of the investment,” he said. “For web-based OTT content, you either recover a part of the cost by selling your rights or you put it on YouTube and hope to recover your cost over time.” Matrubharti releases some of its original web series on its YouTube channel that has just under 9,000 subscribers.

Shemaroo already has a nearly decade-old YouTube business with two channels and over 120 million subscribers combined, offering songs, popular film snippets, and even full-length feature films. The company made just under Rs 64 crore in digital revenues in the quarter, up 20% year-on-year. But the majority of that growth came from its B2B business, aka syndicating its IP to other platforms. But these digital bets are yet to impress investors; shares of Shemaroo Entertainment are down over 60% in the last five years compared to the benchmark Nifty Media, which is down just over 14%.

But in the business of original Gujarati content, it wants to distribute directly.

“We are right now purely pushing behind the SVOD game because we think we have a good enough value proposition to get people to pay,” Shemaroo’s Srivastava says. “We are creating a market in Gujarati. The best way to test it is to see the consumer’s propensity to pay. If we win that and then scale up from there, then we will evaluate advertising at a later stage. We need to build first that kind of scale and test different models of consumption. We will have some advertising at some point of time obviously because we have a differentiated audience of Gujarati [language] consumers.”

Shemaroo can draw comfort from the success of Bengali language streaming service Hoichoi, run by Kolkata-headquartered film production and distribution firm SVF Entertainment. In FY23, Hoichoi made nearly Rs 66 crore in revenues with a minor profit of Rs 26 lakh, company financials show. Revenue from operations was up 29% although profits fell to about a fourth, year-on-year.

“One platform that seems to have a sensible, sound business is Hoichoi,” Shemaroo’s Srivastava says. “We have to understand that everybody comes from a certain right to win. Bengali is a huge market both in and outside India. They are well entrenched in that as a player in content creation. They are also serving the whole market of West Bengal and Bangladesh.”

Shemaroo’s right to win may come from being a family-run business run by Gujarati entrepreneurs from Mumbai, the nerve centre of India’s biggest entertainment industry. Just like its counterparts Hoichoi and (primarily) Telugu language platform aha, ShemarooMe is also targeting the Indian diaspora that speaks Gujarati. To get bigger, it will have to not just convince viewers to ditch widely-available mainstream Hindi for authentic Gujarati fare, but pay for it too.