Cut the cord

Anurag Chakraborty

A glitzy debut on American TV and a dazzling win at the People’s Choice Awards, actor Priyanka Chopra is starting off the new year riding a high. But in less splashy quarters, Priyanka also began the year donning a producer’s hat — venturing into a television that was not, somehow, on television.

Dubbed a ‘mobi-series’, the Quantico-star has turned co-producer for It’s My City. The series is based on four girls on a journey of life, love and lunacy in Mumbai. The bi-weekly 14-part series, which began on January 22, will have new ‘mobisodes’ every Tuesday and Friday and will even feature Priyanka in some of these.

“Digital is the new frontier of content and I’m diving right in. It’s a super exciting world in which I find myself equally fascinated with and immersed in completely,” Priyanka says in a statement.

The thought behind It’s My City is “to go where the young audience has moved towards, to connect with them in a style that they can identify with, and for me personally, to engage with them in a whole new way”, she says.

The idea might seem a one-off quirky project but a look at the larger scheme of things shows how this is part of a growing trend.

Perhaps a bit ahead of its time, even television mogul Ekta Kapoor tried her hand at producing something on the web as far back as in 2010. And though BolNitiBol, the confessions of an 18-year-old girl, was as annoying as it sounds, the venture was just another sign of how content was going out of living rooms and on to our mobiles, tablets and laptops.

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Traditional TV, distributed through cable or direct-to-home satellite dishes has nothing to fear from Internet, some would say, and in part, they would be correct. Some 13 crore households have televisions in India and its reach is measured to be over 60 per cent of the population — that is 75 crore people.

However, just last December India overtook US to become the second-largest country of Internet users after China. More than 40 crore people, or one-third of India’s population, have access to the Internet and that number is growing at a breakneck speed — close to 49 per cent year over year. Sure most of that internet is not exactly ready to beam down high-definition soaps but as Internet becomes more ubiquitous, and it is inevitable, there is no reason why it cannot become the medium of choice for India’s overwhelmingly young demographic.

“It might seem unimaginable now that Internet will overtake TV but that’s what people who ran radio in India in the 1980s thought. Over the next decade, TV completely took off and how. Yes, these are early days for Internet in India and I don’t expect a paradigm change in the next couple of years. But the way things are going, new kinds of connectivity like 4G and the government’s determination to take the Internet to every doorstep, I suspect the next decade will be as significant as the 1990s,” says Veer Singh, a Delhi-based journalist.

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One of the hottest TV shows in America right now, House of Cards is not on TV. The series airs entire new seasons — all 13 episodes — on Netflix. Many people questioned the $100 million budget for the first two seasons of the TV series but as it proved, there is a market for high quality content produced for an Internet-first audience that will make money and earn plaudits. Who knows, maybe by the end of this year or next, we will have our own version of House of Cards.

In the meantime, an ever-exciting band of independent directors, producers have already begun jumping the ship to the brave new world. From Ekta Kapoor’s BolNitiBol in 2010, we have come a long way to things like Permanent Roommates, Pitchers and Baked. They are relevant, fresh, admittedly not quite as grand as some TV shows are but certainly on their way. Here are some of the best Indian web series airing right now.