The advent of online streaming platforms in the Indian diaspora has been a phenomenon that has spread its influences far and wide with the effective tangent of the Indian diaspora being affected by it on a gargantuan scale. The likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, the major powerhouses of online streaming, amongst numerous other such streaming sites were responsible for spreading the said phenomenon like wildfire which inadvertently led to the formation of AltBalaji, Zee5 and numerous other such homegrown streaming sites.
Due to the over saturation of such streaming sites in the market, the ones that get overshadowed are the numerous regional streaming sites which produce equally riveting productions, if not better. The majority of the regional Online Streaming stakes being held onto by the Bengali streaming site Hoichoi.
The presence of Hoichoi, although prevalent in the Bengali community, has never been able to garner the amount of popularity that it deserves or has deserved since its inception, mostly due to its poor marketing strategy and misplaced commercialisation of it including its marketing and such like. The streaming platform had had its commercials all over the city of Kolkata during the festivities of Durga Puja but the slapping of hoardings throughout the metropolis with mismatched taglines, or ‘remixes’ of popular shows with generic contextual taglines, seldom gains a product its deserved viewership. Case in point, if we consider certain shows on the platform as products, the only way by which a certain product can be popular is only when a certain hype is built up around it. A good chunk of shows nowadays build up their hype on the pretext of a certain actor acting in it (eg: The Forgotten Army- Amazon Prime Video; Smoke- Zee5) or on the pretext of it tackling a certain subject of quantifiable repute, this in turn helps them grow an audience, which is directly proportional to the authenticity and the overall potential of a story to hold the attention of its audience, much before the release of its pilot episode or the release of the movie, for that matter.
In this day and age, the saleability of a tv show, movie, or in this case an entire streaming platform, as material products, has been the focal point of the consumer marketing strategy. Hoichoi’s quantifiable linguistic limitations of regional and language specific streaming platforms majorly affect the entire concept of their saleability, as quite obviously, their target audience should by default be the majority of the Bengali speaking audience, and specifically, the modern generation of the urban Bengali masses who have access to the internet. The entire premise of the platform stands hindered as the market for Bengali cinema or shows, for that matter, due to lacklustre and limited marketing campaigns from their very inception, have isolated a quantifiable chunk of its audience into numerous factions, the most worrying of it being the emergence of the pseudo intellectual cinema which celebrate the existence and use of jargons that effectively isolate the audience and the garbing of its existence under the umbrella of pretense. Srijit Mukherji is one of the many examples and one of the most prolific examples of directors who have succumbed to this trend of pseudo intellectualism in cinema
The trend of pseudo intellectualism in its entirety goes against the very ideals on which the roots of Bengali cinema have been based on and in its entirety it goes against the very ideology of the Cultural Revolution of Indian Cinema in the 1960’s heralded by Satyajit Ray, which strove to bridge the gap between the audience, irrespective of background, strata, creed etc., and the entertainment industry, while the pseudo-intellectualism ‘movement’ effortlessly demolishes the entirety of the bridge while the many intellectual bengali babus sit alongside the modern entertainment industry while the major populace and audience suffer under the garb of elitist entertainment.
Hence, in hindsight, what Hoichoi strives to revolutionize hinders itself in its glory of self proclaimed elitism and mismanaged advertisement, and thus, marketing.
CONTRIBUTIONS:
- Kushan Niyogi
FERNWEH BLOGS 