Is too much of a good thing, a really bad thing? Actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui seems to think so, as he recently announced his decision to quit OTT platforms, observing that they have become repositories of shows that don’t deserve to be seen, or are sequels that have nothing more to say. “When I did Sacred Games for Netflix, there was an excitement and challenge around the digital medium. New talent was being given a chance. Now, that freshness is gone,” lamented the actor, adding that, “It’s become dhanda [racket] for big production houses and actors who are now so-called stars on the OTT platform. Major film producers in Bollywood have cut lucrative deals with all the big players in the OTT field. Producers get whopping amounts to create unlimited content. Quantity has killed quality.”

Filmmaker Suresh Triveni, whose debut feature Tumhari Sulu released in 2017 and who has just wrapped up the shoot of his second film Jalsa, believes that while the saturation is palpable from the business perspective, from a consumer angle, it is far from reaching a tipping point. “The more you see, the more you want, whether you watch it or not, you like the idea that something new is constantly popping up in the gamut of OTT apps,” he notes. While admitting that there are better sensibilities coming into the OTT space due to exposure to international shows, the constant need to feed content accounts for the drop in quality. “There will obviously be a difference between something churned out in six months and something worked on for two years, because you haven’t spent enough time in the script room and you are purely meeting a deadline and fulfilling a contractual obligation to deliver it by a certain time. [Quality is] subjective to time and the demand to have a show on an app every month. A good content creator would say an outright no, but there are people who are out there who cater to this,” he notes.