More Spielberg, less Tarantino: 2020 was the year of OTT and so will be 2021

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David won.

The tipping point for digital entertainment that would have come after three years was super accelerated with this pandemic, which made everyone lean into their screens as the exclusive form of solace amid lockdowns. Four out of five top searched movies on Google this year were OTT babies. Warner Bros. decided to debut its entire 2021 film slate at HBO Max from Wonder Woman, The Suicide Squad to Dune at the same time it debuts in theatres. For India, in 2020 itself Gulabo Sitabo, Dil Bechara, Gunjan Saxena, Laxmii to Durgamati all found home directly in our living rooms. Globally, daily content consumption and overall paid subscribers shot up, OTT, after all, was substituting for Disneyland, Broadway, and IMAX simultaneously.

Delhi Crime brought home India’s first International Emmy and however superfluous, in India, Filmfare did start its own OTT awards this year. A little difficult to understand why movies made on the same budget, sometimes with a better cast and far more reach, need their own small club rather than shaking the big table itself, like Roma and The Irishman did at the Oscars. But that’s a different article.

Already the fastest-growing market in the world, the aggression seen this year in India is just the tip of the iceberg. There are two distinctive indicators in Statista’s Global OTT 2020 report: In revenue, India is on 8th position and in penetration with just above 22 percent at 43rd. This difference is the oil every country is lining up to mine. Of course, apart from having the cheapest internet on Earth, free subscription packs by all telecom operators in the country was a huge benefactor in magically booming the collective user base of the country. In a world mired by investor-driven business, DAU (daily active users) after all became the aspirational driver.

And though the Spanish series Money Heist was the most searched TV series of the year in India, the bold organic viewership growth seen in core regional OTTs in the last six months is indeed a confidence booster for curating richer content in local languages. From niche Hoichoi (Bengali), Aha (Telegu), LetsFlix (Marathi), CityShor (Gujrati) to the way Prime and Netflix are actively bidding for the rights of regional cinema, you know the field is beyond primed. Disney+Hotstar goes even a step further. Slightly elitist but surely marketable, it is not a coincidence that if you want to see a Marvel movie dubbed in any Indian language all you need to pay is Rs 299 per year and the same movie for the original English dub you have to shell out Rs 1,499. A whopping 5X price gap just to fasten the rural penetration.

So here are the four things to expect from 2021:

What’s remaining and will always be is the big screen’s distinctive ability to transport you with visuals critically designed for that size. What is also known as Bollywood's festival films or as Scorsese says theme parks. Big budget fantasies and usually multi starrers—they warrant that kind of spending especially for an average family in a country like India. Zomato can’t kill the dine-in experience of Hyatt just because that food is also available now for online ordering but everyone can neither afford nor prefer Hyatt. Collective experience has had a virtual uplift and quite a few marketing campaigns will follow to promote this new feature that inadvertently also makes the internal brand community stronger. Imagine watching the new season of Sherlock with Cumberbatch!

Eventually like Tesla and Ford, the valuation of OTT will comfortably take over all traditional forms of cinema. And because the magic of big screens will never go out of fashion, only more lavishly experiential, they will either collectively buy stake in one of the big OTTs or be bought over and renamed as an extension. ‘Disney Dreams’ or ‘Netflix & Popcorn’ where shows like The Mandalorian S07 or Stranger Things S10 would finally find their 70 mm canvas. Till then Schitt’s Creek with Jacob's Creek it is! Happy Holidays!

The writer is the chief strategist & founder of Salt and Paper Consulting