ATF: Indian Streaming Platform, Eros Now to Invest $70 Million in Original Content

By Naman Ramachandran

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Indian OTT service, Eros Now is set to launch a 100 new Originals, Eros Digital COO Ali Hussein revealed to Variety. He is a panelist at Singapore’s Asia TV Forum & Market. Eros Digital is an arm of Bollywood studio Eros International.

“Over the last six to nine months what Eros has made known to the rest of the industry that we are looking to scale up our investment in the platform,” said Hussein. The company recently launched digital shows “Side Hero” and “Smoke” and a made-for-digital feature “Meri Nimmo,” directed by Bollywood hitmaker Aanand L. Rai, whose Shah Rukh Khan starrer “Zero” is due a Christmas release.

Rolling out over the next 18 months will be original digital series, films and short-form content. “We are looking to make more relevant programming for the right kind of audience set in the country,” Hussein said. The total investment in the original content slate will be in the range of $50 to $70 million.

“As a company the logic is that we want to be genre agnostic. The comfort space is the work we do in fiction. Non-fiction is not necessarily a natural comfort area, but that’s an area we are trying to learn,” said Hussein.

Eros Now has 13 million paid subscribers and 128 million registered users. In India, it operates three pricing tiers. The free tier provides access to music videos and trailers. The next tier, priced at $0.70 cents per month, gives access to the entire range of content in standard definition, while the premium tier that costs $1.40 a month, provides access to the collection in high definition, subtitles, and multiple device usage. Outside of India, only the premium service is available, priced at $7.99 in the U.S., while in the U.K. it costs £4.99 ($6.39) per month.