Industry Odisha Bureau, Sep 07: India’s content industry is rethinking who owns a show. Tighter margins across TV and streaming are driving this. Producers now want assets, not just commissions. YouTube is becoming a favoured home for that ambition. Connected TV growth is widening the opportunity further.
Balaji Telefilms, led by Ekta Kapoor, illustrates this pivot. The studio partnered with YouTube on five new shows. Together, they span roughly 200 episodes of fiction. Titles include Haq Se Season 2 and Kehne Ko Humsafar Hai Season 4. More projects reportedly remain under development.
Crucially, Kapoor keeps creative control and IP ownership. YouTube instead supplies global reach and monetisation tools. Advertising and brand partnerships form the platform’s commercial backbone. Balaji’s slate will also stream in 4K worldwide.
Why does ownership matter so much now? Commissioned work ends once a show airs. An owned asset can be built on repeatedly. Producers can extend it, license it, or monetise it again. That logic is reshaping how studios plan new content.
Kapoor frames this shift as filling a gap. Television, she said, mostly reaches an older, homebound audience. Subscription platforms, by contrast, court a narrower paying base. YouTube potentially sits between those two audiences. She called owning IP the “need of the hour.”
Connected TV is central to that positioning. YouTube India’s Gunjan Soni cites over 75 million adult CTV viewers. That is specifically YouTube’s audience on bigger screens. India’s total connected-TV base has separately tripled since 2022, reaching 207 million.
Soni argues that scale unlocks cross-category opportunity. “It is creating opportunities for different players across different verticals,” she said. Viewers increasingly want on-demand access alongside big-screen viewing, she added.
This isn’t only a story about production houses. Applause Entertainment and Swastik Productions have launched similar YouTube offerings. YouTube previously worked with Aamir Khan on Sitaare Zameen Par. Talks with other producers are reportedly ongoing too.
Established broadcast personalities are following the same path. Shekhar Suman, once host of Movers and Shakers, moved online. His new show, Shekhar Tonite, now lives on YouTube. He said the format frees him from rigid television constraints.
None of this signals television’s disappearance, though. Traditional TV, streaming and YouTube now serve different audience needs. What’s changing is where producers choose to place new bets.
Taken together, the shift has three moving parts. Producers want to own their intellectual property outright. Connected TV gives that content television-scale reach. Digital platforms add fresh, ongoing monetisation avenues.
Whether this model outperforms traditional commissioning remains unproven. But the underlying incentive, owning rather than renting content, is now unmistakable across India’s studios.
