Birla revives content production company

MUMBAI: Aditya Birla Group chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla has hired Sameer Nair, who had stepped down as the CEO of Balaji Telefilms Ltd last month, to revive Applause Entertainment Pvt Ltd, his privately held production firm that has been dormant for almost a decade after producing Bollywood movies such as Black and Dev.

“We plan to reignite Applause Entertainment to invest in the creation and distribution of content for new audiences and new markets,” Birla said. He plans to invest ₹200-300 crore (for starters) on creating this content for distribution across platforms, films, TV, and digital.

Nair believes that the Indian audience is bored of daily soaps but also that there’s a massive new untapped urban audience that is currently hooked to House of Cards and Game of Thrones . There’s no content currently available in “the world between Naagin and Narcos” Nair said referring to two popular series, one on Indian TV (Colors) and the other on Netflix. “Daily soaps started as an idea in India in the year 2000, but went on to become so wildly successful that they stunted every other form of storytelling. This resulted in us missing an evolutionary step, that of premium subscription content.”

Applause will work with content producers in the established studio-structure.

“There’s a big audience in India today that is fatigued of TV, but is not necessarily watching Netflix. So, the opportunity for us is to create premium content drama series, in multiple languages and genres, in the shorter format with seasons to feed this new audience,” Nair said.

Applause will roll out the first of such shows in the next six months and 20-30 of them over the next 18 months.