copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

Streaming the alter-ego: ALTBalaji, between saas-bahu sagas and fast-fashion erotica

by Akshaya Kumar and Mahima Singh

The Internet, that increasingly pre-eminent distributive force for popular culture material, poses the challenge of appropriating competing media platforms. In the case of news, print, television, and web-exclusive news material become indistinguishable in inter-penetrating multimedia forms spread across the web. Many of these tendencies follow from what Jenkins (2006) calls convergence culture with respect to both devices and web-based platforms. And yet there is an unrelenting effort to secure and monetize content via paywalls. On one hand, this amalgam of convergence and competition makes the Internet a fiercely contested media space—both in terms of original content production and the distribution of content borrowed from competing media. On the other hand, as a “free” and comprehensive repository of information, the Internet remains in fundamental tension with the commerce of media production.

Content produced for traditional television and Internet media have certain continuities but also significant differences. This paper discusses the case of Balaji Telefilms, a prominent Indian television production company celebrated for its role in popularizing “soap operas,” here characterized by family dramas overburdened with histrionics. However, as the company ventured into the digital realm, they reversed their offerings entirely through an OTT platform, ALTBalaji or Alt(ernate) Balaji, which began exploring “bold” originals across genres, including romance, thriller, horror, and comedy. Furthermore, on that platform erotica gained significant traction, as in the web series Gandii Baat (2018), Ragini MMS Returns (2017), and XXX (2018).  In fact, these series forward the legacy of films earlier produced by Balaji Motion Pictures, the film production subsidiary of Balaji Telefilms.[1] [open endnotes in new window]

The case of Balaji Telefilms, therefore, helps us navigate the complex traffic of genres, ideologies and economics of media production across television, film, and OTT platforms. Grappling with Balaji Telefilms' transition to ALTBalaji helps assess the extent to which the medium shapes the encoding of the message in the contemporary Indian media industry (McLuhan 1964), which has an ongoing tug-of-war across segments of that industry. But also, this case study helps us understand the implications of “freedom” on the Internet vis-à-vis its varyingly regulated ancestor platforms. To do so, we need to traverse problems of ideological containment and media censorship in film and television, but also to address, at least briefly, the question of crowd-sourced censorship and the adequate monetization required for streaming platform’ survival when faced with cash-rich behemoths.

At the heart of this paper is the idea that media producers navigate commercial possibilities emergent on the web while being mortally wary of their “unreliable” publics. While web-based content, unlike other media, can be accessed at any point of time from anywhere, it also breeds unauthorized access (peer-to-peer communications), mis-identification and significantly shorter attention spans. Instead of simply being derived from ancestral media forms, web-based content allows encroachment, duplication and cross-dressing across the older media forms’ time-honored boundaries of windowed media distribution. In other words, emergent digital platforms for storytelling have disrupted relatively disjointed film and television economies, roughly since 2013. Unsurprisingly, it is television—already a hotbed of cross-promotional intersections with the film industry (Kumar 2018)—which has come under a compounded attack over the last decade. Indian television in general has stubbornly stood its ground over the last two decades as an incommensurate force that refuses to match step with dominant patterns of television productions worldwide. Here lies the substance of the discord—films as well as web-based series adopt a contrary tactic of “correcting course” in order to be commensurate with their Western counterparts, while television remains defiant.

Between film and television

Let us briefly reckon with two contrasting ventures which pioneered the key tensions under discussion. In 2013, Colors TV aired an official Hindi adaptation of the U.S. thriller, 24 (2001-2014) aired over nine seasons; the adapted action thriller lasted two seasons between 2013-2016. The series offered a fundamental challenge to the narrative design of Indian soap operas, which progressed as if they were suspended in time, defying the slightest sense of real time progression. 24 was a series designed to narrate the story in real time, partly in order to shock the Indian audience out of the slumber that sustained their habituation to never-ending television soaps.

In another instance, in 2014, a YouTube channel popular for mockumentary videos, The Viral Fever (TVF), launched its first web-series, Permanent Roommates. For a YouTube channel of viral videos, it was an audacious move, even though the idea fit the TVF logo that makes a declaration of smashing television itself. The series cleverly adapts the cathartic template of Indian television while also reinforcing the familial order, albeit with qualifications. In the series’ remarkable narrative maneuvers, the lead couple come to learn that they have more in common with the previous generation than they imagine. While showing the resilience of the traditional order, which must never be underestimated, the series offers an allegorical reading about relations between web-based and television series: “The cathartic tendencies of television need not be seen as fundamentally antagonistic—they could be just as resilient as the parental control in the series” (Kumar 2019: 200).

This conciliatory approach stands in relative contrast with the standard TVF stance against television, best reflected in its “The Making of...” (2014) series that spoofs the behind-the-scenes production environment of competing media. In an episode titled “A Decade Long Daily Soap”, it pans the signature style of Ekta Kapoor’s soap operas, produced by Balaji Telefilms. These have scripts marked by a characteristic reluctance against narrative progression, and visually rely on dramatic exaggerations conveyed in extreme close-ups. However, just as 24 did not alter the course of Indian television, let alone revolutionize it, TVF’s admittedly rhetorical promise of smashing television also hasn’t yielded any damage to television. Yet, these rhetorical gestures indicate how emergent media platforms target the sensibilities of niche demographic clusters to announce themselves.

The question of location for streaming platforms within the media space, especially with respect to television and the Internet, has increasingly interested media scholars (Edgerton 2013; Lobato 2019; Lotz 2017). We argue that instead of being engaged in a pitched battle with television as producers assert, web-based platforms offer variations of programming that borrow their entire edifice from the film industry. In other words, streaming platforms have brought television within the commensurate fold, setting aside its obduracy, moving it towards a conciliatory in-between media space. It is impossible to understand this emergent segment of the media market without bringing both film and television industries into the analytical frame. As Punathambekar and Mohan argue, examining digital platforms requires an approach that considers their complex layers of media structures, necessitating an intermedial perspective (2019). While the interpenetration of film and television programming exists on all major platforms including Amazon Prime, Netflix, ZEE5 and Disney+ Hotstar,[2] we explore the key intersections and points of inflection in this journey via the emergence of one exemplary channel, ALTBalaji.

Bolter & Grusin (2000) argue that every act of mediation is always already an act of remediation. The way to understand new media, such as OTT platforms, is therefore not to take on face value their assertions of newness, but to investigate how they re-mediate their media ancestry. The key question to follow may be whether and how OTT platforms re-mediate television or cinema. Operating at the intersection of long-form storytelling and the new vistas of “free” exchange offered by the Internet, streaming cultures appear to give more control to their users even as they are robust manifestations of the infrastructures of control. Algorithms play a curatorial role to organize recommendations for individual preferences, in a way as to nudge the users instead of forcing their hands. In the following essay, we argue the following. First, in stylistic and generic terms, streaming cultures borrow more from cinema than television, primarily because of ideological commensuration with the former, in which censorship plays a vital role, especially in an Indian context which is the purview of this article. Second, cinema took the lead in confronting the challenge of digital capture, and digital production has produced an alternative visuality beyond the editorial stranglehold of mainstream media. Streaming cultures’ relatively playful grappling with the digital thus has its origins in cinema instead of television.

Third, and most important the re-mediation of an admittedly struggling film industry, known for more capital intensive and celebrity-centric storytelling, into streaming platforms struggling for paid subscriptions effectively compels us to acknowledge questions of commercial viability. Since most of the OTT platforms derive from their parent production outfits in the television industry, we get distracted by mainly observing stylistic contrasts with television. Instead we might better frame OTT platforms as indicating a struggling film business trying to best avail itself of the worldwide web. Indeed, films work as singular cultural documents, albeit placed within generic matrices. OTT platforms have built varying affordances and curatorial slants via which they offer an experience spread across their productions. For example, Farzi (2023) and XXX: Uncensored (2018-2020) both began their life as films which were later recalibrated as web-series. The former, a big-budget crime thriller loaded with a star cast landed on Amazon Prime, while the erotic anthology was taken up and adjusted by the budget-conscious ALTBalaji. As we go down a hierarchy of budget preferences, the platform’s curatorial kernel begins to take precedence. As we will show, Balaji Telefilm’s journey from what appears to be conservatism towards sexual liberation on the narrative front also simultaneously represents a journey from professional logistical discipline to amateur cash-burning on the production front. Unsurprisingly, then, profits from television cannot endlessly support experiments on the web. The latter must settle into a curatorial habitus, as it does, which results in the channel’s cheaply produced titillation in the name of servicing a provincial demographic.

Balaji Telefilms and the paradigmatic television soap

India’s broadcast television dates back to 1959 when it was initially established with a strong emphasis on community development and formal education. As a result, early television programming in India revolved predominantly around these objectives, illustrated by programs such as Krishi Darshan (1967), which sought to educate farmers about various aspects of agriculture, including herbs and cultivation practices. However, the television landscape underwent a transformation with the advent of commercials in 1976 and the subsequent separation of the state TV network Doordarshan from All Indian Radio (AIR).[3] This shift contributed to a modest growth in television programming during the 1980s. Punathambekar and Sundar (2017) characterize this period as the “time of television” due to the emergence of progressive melodramas that explored themes such as family planning, education, progress, and modernization. Notable examples from this era include Hum Log (1984) and Buniyad (1986), which introduced developmental modernity as a part of the Indian state’s moralizing drive, in this instance to counterbalance a “vulgar” cinematic public with a modern televisual one (Roy 2008).

Television’s early growth also had much to do with the decline of what Dadawala (2023) calls the “literature-cinema nexus of the Indian New Wave,” referring to the two-decade period ending in 1989, in which New Wave films had “functioned as a unique contact zone between the cinema hall, printing press, and coffee house intellectuals” (2023: 46-47). However, this literary orientation of storytelling derived from Hindi literature was set aside by a raging phase of commercialization. During that time, economic deregulation allowed foreign and domestic companies to launch their own television channels, and Doordarshan’s monopoly loosened up through the 1990s. Viewers gained increasing access to a wider range of television channels, particularly in urban areas. At least in the early years of the transition, this growth was mostly confined to what are termed General Entertainment Channels (GEC).

The two most iconic serials of this period of transition were Junoon (1993-1998) and Tara (1993-1997)—aired on two of the most prominent channels, the public DD National and the private ZEE TV, respectively. Apart from Ramayan (1987) and Mahabharat (1988-1990), Chanakya (1991-1992) and The Sword of Tipu Sultan (1990-1991), serials[4] on the Hindu epics and historical figures, most Doordarshan serials were commissioned for 13 or 26 episodes. Both Tara and Junoon were, however, designed as long-running soap operas with one main narrative trajectory branching occasionally into myriad small ones as the story progressed. They also featured contemporary stories that showcased various elements of the upper/middle class urban lifestyle—highlighting feuds, disputes and conflicts—often in terms of the split between licit and illicit or between gender roles in post-liberalization India (i.e. approximately post-1990).

These serials bore a faint resemblance to their cinematic counterparts, such as Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (1988) and Maine Pyar Kiya (1989). Their cultural imaginary was ensconced within the legacy of Hindi melodramas known as “feudal family romance” (Prasad 1998), in which revolting against the normative boundaries of the patriarchal setup became a narrative device to suggest a defiant rupture. The two serials provided a novelistic narration of their dramatic elements by taking an episodic route to resolutions and transformations. The key difference between cinema and these soaps—and those which followed in their wake, particularly Swabhimaan (1995-1998)—lay in how they handled spectacle, mainly in terms of pacing. They were not, however, designed to address an identifiable target demographic; instead, this was still the realm of television as urban mass culture, repurposing the imaginary mass audience of popular cinema. That is why, the generic composition of television soaps was not yet designed to feed off and amplify cultural distinctions. Balaji Telefilms’ soap operas, however, introduced Indian television to a “demographic intelligence,” which birthed a new era, at least for Hindi television of the twenty-first century.

To give an example of using demography, Balaji Telefilms rose to prominence with Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (2000) and Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii (2000), both aired on Star Plus.[5] These “saas-bahu”[literally, “mother-in-law daughter-in-law”] sagas soon became a massive cultural phenomenon, mostly by their focusing on the key target demographic: housewives. By scripting melodramatic valences of domestic disputes, especially kitchen politics of joint families,[6] the soap operas stretched their narrative across generations. Instead of addressing a mass audience as did the genre’s long-running predecessors, the new soaps’ targeted script design was born in a climate of the widening palette of satellite television. The series were developed with the awareness that it was no longer possible, or even necessary, to address the widest cross-section of audiences in a television economy now characterized by an increasing expansion and generic segmentation.

A decade after economic liberalization, the discourse and appeal of consumerism was powerful enough to overwrite the distinctly austere middle-class domesticity of the early 1990s teleserials. A much more fashion-savvy and opulent display of wealth and status was now presented and widely available on television, especially in shows focusing on the joint families of merchant communities, including Gujaratis, Agrawal baniyas and Punjabi khatris.[7] There are at least two reasons why this deliberate cultural identification, offered narratively via sartorial and culinary choices, language, stereotypes and selected cultural artefacts and mannerisms, gained significant relevance in the trajectory of Hindi television. First comes the data harvesting of audience engagement via third-party agencies, beginning with the monopoly of TAM India and since 2015, Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC). Through television rating points (TRPs), advertising was integrated within the television ecosystem, and went on to determine its future ever since the early 2000s. Second, Hindi television sees an increasing regionalization beginning with Kyunki…, this more local focus became the key navigational tool for both production companies and the audience.

In this light, for example, the Gujarati cultural orientation of Kyunki… and other Balaji Telefilms’ early productions derived from the fact that the Gujaratis had high television viewership (Singh, 2010). The series’ massive success then set a precedent for using regions as in a way that would be vital to twenty-first century television. The productions had cultural consistency entirely unlike an older precedent—Hindi serials. There, cultural markers were abstracted in such a way as to invite attention from across the spectrum of cultures addressable in the Hindi language. Serials now became a hotspot of regional “flavoring,” even as the central idea across the televisual palette remained the same. That is, in the series, homebound female protagonists were still iconic by implying that it was the domestic arena where real power struggles took place. Indeed, such a declaration was entirely at odds with contemporary Hindi films, where key conflicts were usually resolved in full public view - this was especially the case beginning with the rise of film action melodramas in the 1970s up until the late 1990s.

However, it was in the 1990s that a few “family films” established a lucrative trend of what has been termed the cinema of “panoramic interiors,” marked by “the coming together of art directors, the advertising world, fashion designers, and the film industry” (Mazumdar 2007: 120). For Mazumdar, the panoramic interiors in 1990s blockbuster films, such as Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994), are “lavish and ornate, spectacular and garish” (ibid.: 122). The panoramic interior, among other things, is an “architectural spectacle of light space” marked by the absence of dark spaces; it expresses “a crisis of belonging, fear of the street, and the desire for the good life—all at once” (ibid.: 148). While much of Hindi cinema was still ruled by fear of the street, as in gangster films of the period, it was this slice of opulent family melodramas that contemporary television was modeled on. The paradigmatic long-running soap had a distinct resemblance to the rising appetite for a consumerist lifestyle in these films; in both the television and film industries, the panoramic desires were anchored within a rather jarring moral rhetoric of Hindu traditionalism (Fernandes 2007; Uberoi 2006).

Indeed, Balaji Telefilms’ aggressive monetizing of the prime-time slot (8pm-11pm) was not without competition. India’s first 24x7 Hindi news channel, Aaj Tak, was launched roughly six months after Kyunki… Regardless of the soaps’ foregrounding of the joint family, the actual family audience was being increasingly segmented across television genres, including news, soaps, reality television and sports. The fact that most families owned a singular television set intensified that attendant tug of war. The paradigmatic soap, however, intensified its bid for the family audience via housewives. On the ideological front, by addressing the women of the household as key decision makers and the vital force stabilizing conservative value, soaps tried to take the biggest audience slice possible. On the tactical front, the paradigmatic soap after Kyunki… not only uses its leading female protagonists for elaborate promotional campaigns, but also narrates an entire series as the story of her desires and struggles.

While critics occasionally discuss television’s conservative triumph over the domestic arena,[8] they rarely anchor this triumph within censorship. The paradigmatic assertion of television soaps at the dawn of the neoliberal period was to make facets of cultural “traditions” commensurate with modernity, especially with respect to the integrity of the Hindu family. For during this time, both cinema and more importantly the web were seen as potent threats to the social order, of which the joint family became a protected prototype. Balaji Telefilms was at the forefront of devising a series of scripts in which de-facto matriarchs would defend their “territory” in prime-time via a moral rhetoric steeped in melodramatic valences. In doing so, the TV producers acted as proxies for the Indian state, which barricaded middle-class domesticity within stricter censorship norms than any other media platform, at a time when the integrity of the family was threatened by neoliberal economic reforms and their attendant liberal worldview. Regulation, the polite pseudonym for censorship, provided a minimum guarantee to a conservative worldview, which has only expanded its televisual territory via the reign of long-running soaps.

Medium, censorship, content

The adoption and impact of streaming platforms are heavily shaped by shifts in media policy and a history of control exercised over media by respective territories of regional and national media markets. Unsurprisingly, regulatory dynamics have been at the forefront of the messaging that comes from different media platforms. That is, censorship policies vary according to the different media platforms, including television, films, and OTT platforms. Traditional television is distributed via over-the-air transmission, cable, satellite, or IPTV to reach a wide audience. Given its extensive reach and accessibility, television is subject to a more stringent regulatory framework compared to other media, with an aim of maintaining a programming environment devoid of offensive, vulgar, or disruptive elements that may disrupt public order. As Kumar (2018) has noted elsewhere,

“[O]wing partially to their distinct histories within the media economy, media are not only constituted by their formal and aesthetic constraints, but also continue to uphold an ideological function. [Since television was developed in India as a broadcast medium, its] intersection with middle-class domesticity further ensured that the state was built into the imaginary it offered to law-abiding citizens. This imaginary was not substantially overwritten by the emergence of cable and satellite television in the 1990s.”

In India, the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act of 1995, along with subsequent amendments, governs television channels and imposes significant restrictions on content (TRAI, 1995). Notably, two channels, AXN and Fashion TV, faced a temporary ban in 2007 for broadcasting explicit adult content during daytime hours. More important, the television cut of theatrical films gets re-certified or re-censored and is so extensive that it is often too disheartening for directors to watch. Producers tolerate such tampering only because satellite television screening rights provide an important revenue stream, especially for low-budget independent films.

Poduction houses like Balaji Telefilms have championed the cause of television’s serving conservative values. They not only align with strict state censorship but go overboard in trying to set standards for the protection of televisual publics within a changing media landscape. The greatest challenge for films, since 1951 force-edited and certified by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) (India Today, 2019), is to pass through the regulatory hoops enforced by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) as well as other restrictions enforced by respective channels. While many filmmakers ensure that their films remain on the favorable side of the censorship norms of both CBFC and TV channels, others like Anurag Kashyap would test the limits of CBFC and risk relinquishing satellite rights altogether or accept a television cut only for the financial support. A-rated movies (for adults), for example, can only be televised with further restrictions, since the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has issued guidelines specifying designated time slots after 11 PM to prevent access by minors. However, the channels still may not buy the rights for an A-rated film; the only safe option for filmmakers is to go for re-certification. After re-applying, the films seek either a “U” (unrestricted public exhibition) or “U/A” (unrestricted public exhibition subject to parental guidance for children below the age of 12) certificate for television viewing. Even so, the state-owned broadcaster Doordarshan only accepts films with a “U” certificate. This re-certification provision is still not officially part of the Cinematograph Act, but production companies such as Balaji Telefilms and Viacom18 have far stricter oversight by their content regulation teams (Jha, 2016). Also, certain unsuitable scenes or content may yet be subject to a company’s editing or censorship over and above all the above-mentioned letter of the law, in the spirit of protecting middle-class domesticity from “unsuitable” content. Examples of such content include depictions of explicit sexual content, partial nudity, graphic violence, or substance abuse.

With the entry of streaming platforms, however, this arrangement between films and television has been destabilized. OTT content in India is regulated by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and follows a self-regulatory mechanism. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (IT rules, 2021) require OTT platforms to adhere to a code of ethics, including provisions related to content classification, age restrictions, and self-regulation (MEITY, 2021). Because these guidelines merely facilitate self-regulation and only demand self-identification by the viewers themselves, they effectively endorse the disruptive prowess of streaming platforms in at least two ways. First, in order to bypass television’s position within the revenue stream, OTT platforms began to offer a higher revenue support to films at a time when satellite-rights value was already on a steady decline towards a market correction across revenue-sharing streams (ibid.). Second, OTTs have become a more “natural” ecosystem for films since they offer far more modest self-regulation for the so-called adult content (nudity, abusive language, and violence). This regulatory environment has reinforced filmmakers’ preference for digital platforms, which do not hold any brief for censorship or content regulation. This is true even for those film production platforms which have a shockingly contrary approach on their television channels (e.g., Colors versus Voot; Balaji Telefilms vs ALT Balaji). Censorship has therefore been critical to the emergent solidarity between the film industry and OTT platforms, neither of which, however, have the reach of television.

The above illustrates how content has circulated on apparently distinct media platforms; it is not necessarily determined by the volition or character of media production outfits. Instead, content prospers on a platform according to the maneuverability offered within the letter and spirit of regulations. The case of Balaji Motion Pictures (BMP) is illustrative here. While an arm of Balaji Telefilms, it started producing films only a year after Kyunki… Yet, unlike its television soaps, BMP’s ethos would be best described as the media industry equivalent to investing in “penny stocks.” On one hand, TV soap producer Ekta Kapoor’s approach is to never stray away from the key tenets of the television soap system. On the other hand, BMP’s catalogue showcases a considerable appetite for experimentation, as long as it does not come with a big price tag. Commentators who launched many a diatribe against Kapoor’s soaps often failed to consider that the regressive ideology of television soaps reflected not her ideological bearings as much as the systemic stability of a culture machine that she built on the platform of regulation.

As I shall argue hereafter, ALTBalaji’s inclinations could be traced back to ALT Entertainment, which began its career in 2010 as a re-branding effort towards a production outlook oriented to erotica
(DNA, 2010). This was required for protecting BMP and Balaji Telefilms from the possibility of a compounded loss of the brand image and the financial uncertainties of a stronger risk profile (Tanvir 2015). But this freedom from a legacy outfit and its legacy investment in the apparatus of production “standards” also created a space for “Low-Res Horrors,” often marked by digital capture’s characteristic grainy images (Sen, 2014). Notable films showcasing ALT’s relation with digital capture were Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (LSD) (2010) and its successor, Ragini MMS (2011). As a critical voyeuristic assembly of what may be termed alternative visuality—CCTV cameras, cellphone cameras, spy cameras, webcams etc.—LSD showcased the slippery multiplication of digital capture, which was fundamentally invigorated by the idea of a scandal. This alternative visuality relied on the specter of an always lurking camera-eye. Precisely because the Ragini franchise directly bridges ALT Entertainment and ALTBalaji, its OTT successor—but also helps establish the film industry-based ancestry of OTT platforms—we must investigate it more.

Ragini, leaked online

Both LSD and Ragini MMS [9] have scripts dealing with leaking a digital recording into the public domain. This digital record may be kept for a range of intentions—security, housekeeping, “sting” videos, casual camera fetish or betrayal of trust for personal profit or redemption. But in all these scenarios, the audience is implicated in voyeurism since viewers’ access to the narration itself comprises a collaged alternative visuality. The attendant dark pleasure is what distinguishes the grainy low-res images from the legacy of well-lit images grabbed by a film camera, and these then go through rigorous cosmetic treatment at the editorial desk. The idea of an MMS scandal refers to the discreet peer-to-peer circulation of a “sextape”—an amateurish recording of sexual intimacy, situated on the opposite end of the visual spectrum from professionally mounted productions.

However, Ragini MMS also successfully rehashed a well-established recipe of amateurish productions of 1970s-80s Hindi cinema—a horror-cum-sleaze blend that reigned supreme in the B-circuit (Singh 2008). Public attention around the first major MMS scandal in 2004 offered the possibility of multiplying amateurish horror with the often-inadvertent circulation of digital sleaze. This recipe went on to pile on what became the formidable Ragini franchise. The film sequel, Ragini MMS 2 (2014) was followed up with a web series—two seasons of Ragini MMS: Returns (2017-2019)—which premiered on ALT Balaji. Even the sex comedy film Great Grand Masti (2016), produced by ALT Entertainment makes a clear reference to the Ragini franchise via the female ghost-protagonist, who is named Ragini.

The franchise’s primary narrative premise revolves around a group of characters who find themselves entangled in paranormal experiences while residing in a haunted location. The franchise adopts a found-footage-style, utilizing a blend of handheld cameras and surveillance footage to enhance its reality effect. In the first season of Ragini MMS: Returns (2017) the first episode titled Sex Shaadi MMS opens with an aerial shot of a village, gradually zooming into an out-of-use, eerie mansion. This is where the viewers are treated to several erotic encounters. The first track develops a romantic plotline—private sexual intimacy followed by public display of erotic dance as an item song [the item song/number is a dance routine with its own visual grammar designed to amplify the erotic value of the dancing body; see Kumar (2017) for more]. The second track aborts the first plotline with an orthogonal incision, when the characters stumble upon a pornographic CD that contains a secretly filmed intimate scene captured by a CCTV camera. The interruption adds perspective by navigating us away from direct consumption of erotic pleasure towards its “accidental” digital capture.

Indeed, ALTBalaji’s desperate bid against leaking money while experimenting with plot devices and visual schemes prioritizes faster gratification. In addition, the shift to digital capture has also facilitated a shift in cultural acceptability towards amateurism. Such amateurish may even enhance the value of media-texts, since it amplifies its truth-claim by bypassing media industry’s trademark professional sophistication. This broad appeal of digital amateurism eventually gave ALT Balaji a recipe for their low-budget productions. Amateur media production, however, is not confined here to flat, grainy digital images and low resolutions. It also incorporates a production ethos which is fundamentally opposed to mainstream film and television production studios’ editorial overreach. Carrying forward the legacy of B-movies, here we witness a deliberate offering which uses amateurism as a sign of pirate predation. Such production techniques extract value in the way fast-fashion knockoffs do—via faster production lines and supply chains that invest much less time and resources on design, material quality, and production. The story and screenplay, therefore, only prepare a broad arena in which the audience gathers for erotic compensation. Therefore, I identify this subgenre as fast-fashion erotica.

What we witness in the Ragini franchise is the wedding of cultural anxiety about leaky sexual intimacy with an apparatus of voyeuristic, alternative visuality. The visual style facilitates a quick and amateurish process of value extraction from the storyline. The smooth transition of a found footage erotic horror film into a web-series with stable generic credentials illustrates how OTT platforms’ succession are not merely an Internet-based extension of television. Cinema in the twenty-first century went through certain key transformations—including the incorporation of digital capture—which have been central to the stylistic as well as ideological blends available on streaming platforms. While streaming cultures have been rather boastful about “revolutionizing” television, by and large they have mainly adapted cinematic screenwriting and genres towards long-form episodic storytelling. But ALTBalaji has used cinematic practices that delivered substantial returns at the low-budget production end. Unwilling to burn its hands with lavishly mounted productions, ALTBalaji shrewdly deploys a “demographic intelligence” for efficiency. In the following section, we will address the most vital demographic cluster for ALTBalaji—provincial north India.

Gandii Baat: the provincial calculus

Gandii Baat (2018-), an erotic series about sexual proclivities in provincial north India, has completed seven seasons of varying length. It is quite probably ALTBalaji’s biggest success to date and one that the platform is known for. Each episode presents a distinct story, which allows the series to meander across a number of genre orientations, including horror, crime, comedy and thriller. Just as the long-running soap shifted the key site of conflicts over value systems within the domestic arena, Gandii… diverts attention away from urban sex comedies—a genre iindulged in by BMP and ALT Entertainment with series such as Kyaa Kool Hai Hum (2005), Kyaa Super Kool Hai Hum (2012), Kyaa Kool Hain Hum 3 (2016) and Great Grand Masti (2016). In contrast, Gandii… looks toward towards provincial India, and key examples of other ALTBalaji series set in provincial north India are Helllo Jee (2021) and Virgin Bhasskar (2019-2020). The idea that these series rail against is that provincial north India is the domain of dull and arduous struggles. In fact, the series is driven by a libidinal imperative and showcases all sorts of sexual adventures to scandalize its audience.

To be fair to Gandii…, ALTBalaji draws upon one of the key shifts in preferences that cinema in north India has responded to over the last two decades. This pertains to the emergence of Bhojpuri cinema on one hand (Kumar 2021), and the emergence of “small-town” Hindi films on the other hand (Kumar 2013).[10] Both trends began roughly around 2003, with Haasil (2003) and the Bhojpuri blockbuster, Sasura Bada Paisawala (2003). The trajectories of both Hindi and Bhojpuri cinema, therefore, were driven by a desire to re-invite those situated outside the shifting worldview of metropolitan cultures, shaped as they were in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms. If Bhojpuri films assert cultural pride in the region via the media industry’s feeding a working-class audience spread across the country, the provincial turn in Hindi cinema offered a new imaginary for the “small-town”—marked here by relentless buffoonery while also cautioning against a provincial capacity for uninhibited violence. Unsurprisingly, then, ALTBalaji also aired the first ever Bhojpuri language web-series, Hero Vardiwala (2019). However, unlike Hindi language ALTBalaji productions which only feature relatively unknown actors, the Bhojpuri web-series featured one of the most prominent Bhojpuri stars, Dineshlal Yadav.

ALTBalaji’s provincial constellations push the local imaginary forward by giving it an erotic surplus. Just like its engagement with low-res digital capture in the Ragini franchise, the substantial visual engagement with provincial worlds is dismal in Gandii… The series clearly uses a backdrop of provinciality to give a rustic flavour to the scandals that occasion multiple erotic encounters. Yet the imprecision and inconsistency of regional markers—for stories set in Rajasthan, Haryana or Bihar—is also glaring here. This laxness is unlike the visual production of the  saas-bahu saga, where sartorial, culinary and linguistic inclinations were relatively carefully mapped, even if in a stereotypical manner. The reason why that sort of careful cultural coding is not necessary here is twofold. First, the series is not targeted at the specific cultural demography it addresses, but at the widest cross-section of interest around rustic provinciality, much of which prevails among the urban audience. Second, budget constraints do now allow the time or resources required for such an elaborate mapping; indeed, amateurism is built into the production ethos of fast-fashion erotica.

However, ALTBalaji is fully conscious of the burdensome legacy of Balaji Telefilms, not merely as the powerhouse of Indian television, but as an ideological force, which ALTBalaji is often measured against. In that light, Gandii… also presents a scenario which mocks the legacy by making a snide reference to it, before violating its ideological basis. For example, the first episode of the first season opens in a village located in western Uttar Pradesh with the Karwachauth ritual, wherein the married woman (Gunja) is seen worshipping her husband on the terrace at night. Karwachauth, in particular, has been central to the films and television soaps that characterized the panoramic interior. It represents a cultural fabric which refuses to bother with contemporary criticisms of the gender politics of traditional rituals. But having made a reference to the conservative social fabric that Balaji often upholds obdurately, the episode goes on to establish a charade behind the ritual, as it ends with a threesome to save Gunja’s dysfunctional marriage with a gay man. Both Karwachauth and the threesome are used as for their scandalous potential, pitched against each other.

The series is also peppered with double-entendre and playful titillation via an elaborate verbal and gestural vocabulary that generally is featured all across the B-movie and fast-fashion erotica segment. Often enough, this means re-using a staple diet of cliched witticisms, which reek of amateurism at the level of screenwriting. Most of these verbal duels in Gandii…, but also in other ALTBalaji series, are meant to amplify the primarily sexual value of female bodies; except that in several instances, the women themselves deploy their sexuality to extract value. While this may appear to reverse or critique the sexualization of female body, such workarounds only give gender-equal opportunities to showcase a cynical manipulation of sexuality. For ALTBalaji series, the scandal is the pre-eminent dressing for sexual encounters of all sorts. The incidents help not only showcase eroticism for titillation, but they also extract the full “value” of sexuality in a professionalized cynical manipulation of identity politics.

Presumably, the idea behind a whole spectrum of sexual “revolution” is to “break social boundaries” by giving its apparent due to “taboo love”—as declared explicitly in the trailer of another ALTBalaji series, Hai Taubba (2021, both seasons). Disappointingly though, breaking social boundaries and challenging social evils only amounts to romances contained within LGBT relationships. None of these are given their due in terms of (inter)subjective emotional complexity, because the purpose is to manipulate the scandalous value of sexual desire from across the preference spectrum. In the ALTBalaji paradigm, therefore, sex is often the scandal, the crisis event as well as the redemption. However, going so strategically and aggressively after the post-censorious vistas often activates other regimes of censorship.

Crowd-sourcing censorship

The distinctive characteristic of censorship in India has always been its uneven application, which offers a lot of room for creative as well as political maneuverability. Considering co-productions by ZEE5 and ALTBalaji, one may ask, for example, why ZEE5 found certain shows in violation even though ALTBalaji took the opposite stance. In an episode of X.X.X.: Uncensored, one such co-production, a woman married to a soldier makes her lover wear her husband's army uniform. Some viewers found the scene offensive to the Indian armed forces, and it was promptly removed by both the platforms. Another such co-production, Virgin Bhasskar, was censored after the intervention of the minister of Information & Broadcasting, Prakash Javadekar. In this case, a ruling party member of the Indian Parliament took offence to a signboard in the show that mentioned the name Ahilyabai; he claimed that it defamed Ahilyabai Holkar, an 18th century Maratha ruler (Deep, 2020). These co-productions follow from an alliance formed in 2019, when ZEE5 and ALTBalaji began collaboration on original content production, which allowed both to leverage each other’s strength in the streaming market and reinforce their respective catalogues. While the alliance still continues, both of the shows along with Gandii… have been removed from ZEE5 since the announcement of above-mentioned IT Rules, 2021.

To be clear, the content regulation for digital media has a three-tier structure, and must be initiated by user grievances. One of the many self-regulatory bodies set up for this purpose is Digital Publisher Content Grievances Council (DPCGC), under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. After the first step in which users file complaints to be resolved by respective OTT platforms, the user could approach DPCGC if she is not satisfied with the resolution. The third tier is where a committee set by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting could be approached (Mitaksh, 2023). The interpretation of these guidelines, therefore, depends on platforms’ anticipation of the threat posed by viewers’ grievances. But of course, if the above-mentioned cases are anything to go by, crowd-sourcing politically motivated grievances is a potent threat.

Since the government of India is controlled by a political party known for its prowess for crowd-sourcing and unleashing terror and organized boycotts, the platforms are in no mood to run afoul of it over compliance, even as the country’s apex court deliberates upon the legal validity of IT Rules. In fact, the fear of crowd-sourced censorship is so intense that even self-regulatory bodies with no constitutional powers to order removal of content take direct inspiration from the “censor board,” as CBFC was known prior to 1983. In a rather striking example of this, DPCGC, which is “neither a court nor a tribunal, and can only issue guidance or advisories to platforms,” ordered another fast-fashion erotica platform, ULLU, to take down several of its web-series (Srivastava, 2023). The complaint was indeed raised by an “aggrieved” user, even though there are no legal bases to take down content on account of obscenity. In another recent instance, which was a direct reminder that the OTT platforms are not free of regulatory oversight, the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting has moved to block 18 OTT platforms found distributing “obscene, vulgar, and in some cases, pornographic content,” after consultations with other Government of India departments and domain experts in media, women's rights, and child rights (MIB, 2024).

ALTBalaji’s position should therefore be considered brave in a streaming market where offence can be taken with most of their deliberately designed taboo erotica. This is why we must be mindful in our analysis of the rhetoric that secures erotica with a cladding. This is the rhetoric of celebrating alternative sexuality, identity politics, feminist media production and sexual liberation at large—ideas fundamentally alien to the Balaji Telefilms worldview. Even though most of the ALTBalaji audience comprises young men—aged between 18-35 years and outnumbering women three times (Jalan, 2020)—most of their series are led by female protagonists. By foregrounding women as assertive participants in their audacious sexual adventures, it champions the cause of compensating for centuries of repression. Is such a compensation enough, however, to offset the losses incurred by ALTBalaji on the financial front?

ALTT: Balaji no more

While ALTBalaji appeared to be a successful force within the streaming market, it was rapidly burning the capital earned by Balaji Telefilms. Most OTT platforms cannot delink financialization from their long antecedence in television, or ancestry based in other media as in the case of The Times Group-owned MX Player. ALTBalaji’s needed to acquire enough direct subscribers so that its losses could be covered by profits made by TV and film business (Jalan, 2019). But ALTBalaji could not streamline and optimize production work in the way its parent company Balaji Telefilms did for television. In spite of the evident amateurism of its productions, “the cost of 20 to 30 minutes of fiction content on digital can be as high as Rs 12- Rs 15 Lakh (1 lakh = 100,000 INR, or approximately 1,200 USD)… which is almost twice of that of TV” (Pahwa, 2017). The logistical and financial discipline practiced at Balaji Telefilms, along with its choice of new actors and recurrently-used sets and post-production equipment, gave it an advantage it has not been able to replicate on the streaming platform.

ALTBalaji’s preference for fast-fashion erotica mounted atop its rhetoric of sexual liberation, we argue, emerged from a desire to find a stable production ethos, so as to find its optimized logistical grid. Its failure to square off cheap erotica with feminist rhetoric has resulted from its inability to find viewers’ support for series such as The Test Case (2017), which deviated from the recipe. Mainstream’s paradigmatic soap’s triumph must be seen as a result of Balaji Telefilms’ Fordist production design, which does not extend easily to streaming cultures. In Ekta Kapoor’s assessment, the standardization of television soaps followed from its televisual mode of address, which remains tied to a mixed demographic setting. Streaming cultures, however, are expected to address private individuals’ “slightly darker” sensibilities, and are premised upon individual taste (Ramachandran, 2022). In this distinction too, OTT platforms resemble cinemagoing and its attendant investment in engulfing a darkness that isolates the individual even as one participates in a collective experience. An inability to downsize production costs for web-series has, however, compelled the re-branding and downsizing of the platform itself.

ALTBalaji is now ALTT, with a new logo. On one hand, the new brand allows the legacy of Balaji Telefilms to disengage from the production style, pretty much in the same way as BMP floated ALT Entertainment for its experiments with digital capture. It has also allowed the Kapoors to step aside from possible legal hassles born out of crowd-sourced censorship, while ALTT has hired executives from fast-fashion erotica platform ULLU (Broadcast and CableSat, 2023). On the other hand, making a new entity clears the way for ALTT to pursue its destiny with low-budget amateur erotica, while Balaji Telefilms focuses on producing content for other platforms, including Netflix; as it did and continues to do with its television productions. For ALTT, however, fast-fashion erotica is not their genre preference, but that of their audiences, “especially from non-metro, tier-II and III areas” (ibid.). If the cladding of feminism and LGBT rights over cheaply produced erotica is the first layer of curatorial deception, the championing of provincial north India’s colorful desires provides the second layer.

The problem, however, remains that these claddings are unsecured in terms of business. In a climate of data-driven media production, especially for streaming platforms which often insist on third-party agencies’ traction reports, securing content by data must endorse capital investment and manage financial risk. As discussed above, as a media production outfit primarily invested in television, Balaji Telefilms entered streaming with a content-centric approach. It failed to develop the armor required for a predictive calculus that forms, by and large, the fulcrum of streaming cultures. Kapoor herself admitted ALTBalaji’s shortcomings with any algorithmic extraction of usage data (Ramachandran, 2022). This lack marks ALTBalaji as not as a “digital native” but more as a legacy media platform, one never prepared to invest heavily in things such as flagship crime thrillers that are prohibitively expensive to mount. Its struggles in the streaming space must therefore be seen as a problem faced by its model built on ideology and censorship. Having launched an alter-ego to shift the balance, ALTBalaji’s foray into fast-fashion erotica and the provincial calculus was shaped by how it shifted gears from conservatism into neoliberal identity politics, and from relishing censorship to flag-bearing a “rebellion” against it.

Coda

In a 2021 conversation with Mumbai-based producers, Karan Johar, owner of Dharma Productions that produces content for both box-office and streaming platforms, spoke about the unprecedented rise of legal cell and market research agencies like Ormax Media over the previous few years in the industry (YouTube, 2021). A legal cell is a dedicated team within a media organization, such as a film production company, responsible for managing legal matters, ensuring compliance with laws and regulations, protecting intellectual property rights, and addressing potential legal threats, including crowd-sourced censorship. Market research agencies specialize in collecting and analyzing data on audience preferences, viewing behaviors, and cultural trends. These agencies provide insights that help media companies make informed decisions about content creation, distribution, and marketing by mapping cultural preferences to specific demographic segments through audience surveys and other analytical tools.

While the legal cell is the corporate response to threats of crowd-sourced censorship attempts, Rastogi (2023: 73) argues that the role of data prophecies in gatekeeping content emerges from audience surveys, which provide the “framework for the curatorial logic of platforms” that map cultural preferences against sampled demographic segments. This retooling of media production serves computational capital’s insatiable appetite for metrics (Beller, 2016), as is most evident in the case of companies like Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar and Amazon. It is fundamentally about the ability to show to investment banks, asset managers in financial services, venture capitalists and shareholders the algorithmic capability of processing data—on media genres, audience segmentation, traction measurement etc. The Asian expression of the financialized platform economy has led to the emergence of super apps, funded by technology and investment megacorps such as SoftBank Vision Fund and Tencent (Steinberg, Mukherjee and Punathambekar, 2022). The Indian counterpart of this phenomenon of “national champions,” Reliance Jio, certainly has the capability to convert oligopoly capital into computational capital, but it has yet to unleash that capability in terms of productions’ catalogues. In the meanwhile, relatively traditional media outfits are confronted by a lack, as and when they enter the realm of media portfolios built on a predictive calculus (see Kumar, 2018).

As we have shown, Balaji Telefilms’ journey toward its alter-ego takes us from the lavishly mounted conservative worldview contained within panoramic interiors toward amateurish predation upon provinciality. The infantilization of characters within the production of fast-fashion erotica is symbolic of ALTBalaji’s inability to trust its audience with either storytelling devices or capital investment. This follows from a legacy media company’s unwillingness to enter the “data game”—in which traction metrics are traded for promotions and research, but most important, attract investment capital from asset management services like Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity etc. Ideological maneuvers have limited value in the battle against numbers, especially when the latter become a reference unto themselves. What is underway within the Indian streaming market, then, is a battle between ideological containment and containment by financialization.

Notes

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