New Information Technology rules threaten the creative freedom enjoyed by OTT platforms

Soon after the recent legal trouble that Amazon Prime Video series Tandav found itself in — including an FIR against the company’s India head Aparna Purohit — industry observers expected an apologetic official statement. “The guidelines claim to be ‘self-regulatory’, but they feed into a regulatory system that can substantially expand the government’s power to censor content,” says Joshi. Push vs. pull One of the government’s stated objectives for these guidelines is to “level the playing field” between TV/ film producers and OTT platforms; the former were, and are, subject to a broadcaster’s code, after all. “It is a massively collaborative medium, so many people’s hard work and livelihoods are tied up with it.” Nipped in the bud Moving forward, these last few years may well be remembered as a rare unregulated time for OTT platforms. Today, even if I look at Facebook ‘memories,’ posts from two-three years ago, I find myself getting anxious sometimes, ‘Will I get into trouble for this?’ So yes, I do think that the OTT people adapting my stories… things are definitely tougher for them than they were for me.” Solanki is writing a crime novel these days and he’s positive that eventually his publishers will ask him to change the name of a character called Godse.