Filmmaker Kiran Rao feels that the “golden age” of streaming platforms in India is over. Speaking at the 7th edition of the Indian Screenwriters Conference (ISC), hosted by the Screenwriters Association of India (SWA), the director said, “OTT was this golden egg; everyone could do everything that they dreamt of, and it had to come full circle. There is a lot of promise there, a lot of stories to be told, I just don’t know how many people are commissioning them and (if) the economics allows one to do. Like everything, there was a golden age, but I am not sure where it goes from here. We still have some great writing on OTT in India, but there is a lot more to be done.”

She was in conversation with moderator-writer Mitesh Shah, known for penning Tumbbad (2018), for a masterclass session at the event. Kiran also noted that there was hardly any difference between the content on OTT and films today: “Now, more and more, you see the kind of things that are so-called ‘working’ or big on OTT in India are usually stuff which isn’t vastly different from what we would see in films. So, the promise of world-building and doing other stuff may not have been (fulfilled). That’s also because I think there has been a bit of a bubble burst.”

Kiran’s directorial Laapataa Ladies was well received when it dropped on a streaming platform. When asked if she plans to start another OTT project, she said, “I have a couple of series ideas, including a mini-series, but I don’t know where to go with what I am doing. I feel like taking the ideas that I wrote for my series and making them into films!”