If you, dear Indian internet user, look at majority of the ‘viral’ or immensely popular short-form skit videos (audiovisual listicles of sorts) that have been shared relentlessly on Facebook over the last year, you may just notice that they originate from the same platform.
FilterCopy was made with precisely this intent, and they seem to have cracked some kind of uncrackable formula. Dice Media, their sibling platform, has rolled out two ‘thoda hatke’ multi-episodic web shows (Not Fit, Little Things) — one of which our website reviewed very favourably earlier this year. Both of them come under the bigger umbrella of Pocket Aces, a content-creation company with perhaps one of the coolest office spaces in India (we can attest to this fact; perhaps the length of this chat below is down to our unwillingness to exit these surroundings).

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The co-founders, Ashwin Suresh and Anirudh Pandita, have been at it for two years now. And they’ve already accomplished a fair bit. The team has grown, and their content — both great and not-so-great — has acquired the sort of visibility very few others can boast of on a consistent basis. This is, in no way, down to chance or luck.

To get to the bottom of these analytical methods behind the controlled madness, CHINTAN BHATT enters their holy space — and has a long, no holds-barred and very informative chat with the guys.

Here’s their journey from scratch, right up to the release of their latest web-series, Little Things, which just completed its season (5 episodes).

How did it all begin?

Ashwin: After graduating (12th grade) in Dubai, I moved to the US to study engineering at the University of Illinois. This is where I met Anirudh, who was a year junior to me in undergrad. We became roommates in college. Even back then, we started a few things together like cricket and investment banking clubs. I moved to New York after my Masters to work in investment banking for a few years. It was a bad market back in 2007-2009; I found myself having a lot of time on my hands. During peak market hours, I used to be working 18 hours a day; it was now down to 10-12 hours. I happened to move to Union Square in a building which shared a wall with the New York Film Academy. I thought this is providence — I had always been interested in media and entertainment. So I started going to evening classes at the academy, made a short film, produced a bunch of stuff for other people, worked as a technician — the whole film-school gamut. I realised soon that I wasn’t suited to be a director. I had more of a business understanding; I had an ability to understand content, but I couldn’t create as well as I would’ve liked to. Simultaneously, I was working in as many things as I could in this space: I was organizing a film festival, which at the time was called the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival. It’s now called the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF), curated by a journalist named Aseem Chhabra.
At some point I realised that I used to look forward to my evenings much more than my day. I thought I should change that around — why not move to India? My wife, who was working with Goldman-Sachs there at the time, also decided to take some time away. So we moved here. She had a plan — to work in Social Development. I just came saying, “kuch karenge film mein”. I ended up meeting someone at Reliance Entertainment — they were looking to create an in-house creative-development cell. I was brought on to build that up. But I quickly realised that Reliance is more suited to the acquisition structure — buying films from producers like Excel, VVC etc. For a year or so, I did produce a couple of in-house films for them: small films called Commando, Sooper Se Ooper, but nothing that really broke out. I wanted to do something bigger and more meaningful. So I quit, along with a woman called Priti Shahani who headed Strategy there. We then came across an opportunity when Vineet Jain, MD of the Times Group, wanted to get back into the film business. They had tried earlier, but it was never really an institutional effort. This time he wanted to set up a studio and do it at a corporate level. It was a good challenge for us. The two of us started something that is now called Junglee Pictures. We set it up from scratch. We were a 3-person team, just about to hire the fourth, with a slate of films like Dil Dhadakne Do, Talvar and Bangistan lined up. But in my first year itself I noticed that things weren’t going according to plan. The decision-making, the instincts that I thought we should have had was lacking. And I was powerless to do anything about it because I wasn’t the decision maker.

And so you decided to become the decision maker. 

Ashwin: Sort of. Over those few years, I had met so many talented writers, but noticed how long they were spending outside big offices just waiting for an opportunity to be read. It’s not that big directors like Karan Johar don’t want to read your script; it’s just that he doesn’t have the time to read every single script that reaches his desk. The system is many-to-one, where many look towards one for a job, which makes for a broken and inefficient system. I thought why not do something better where we can bypass traditional distribution and get access directly to the consumer through the digital medium. That way, we could perhaps produce things that reinvent the art of “production”. Production, I had observed, was very bloated. In all the film sets that I was a part of, a lot of people didn’t have much to do on the set. If you need five carpenters, there are eight; if you need two spot boys, there are six. We needed to think about how “lean” filmmaking would work. Around then, Anirudh had moved to India. He had graduated with an MBA from Wharton and had worked in a hedge fund there until he had visa trouble. I convinced him to move here to Mumbai because there was definitely an opportunity for us. I knew he liked the space, too, because we were doing something of the sort on a smaller scale in college too. Roger Ebert’s film festival used to happen in our college town, and our passion was rooted together from those days.
We decided to start something on our own. The initial idea was to bypass the production system and give writers direct access to the distribution — meaning we’d get good scripts, and we’d be the guys to place them in a production office. All writers needed to do was write. I think this approach was a bit naive, because we quickly realised that the system is set up to not have a lot of growth linked into it. People have very vested interests; they only want to do certain types of things with certain kinds of people. Ultimately it didn’t make any sense. 150-200 films get made in Bollywood each year; let’s say each of them has two-three actors. That’s 400 jobs — a very small industry — out of which some will be taken by the regular guys. So you have maybe 100-200 jobs that a million people are fighting for? It’s set up to fail.

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Anirudh: If you look at it from a business perspective, the industry is not in a good shape. And it’s never been in decent shape. It’s not some recent phenomenon. The box-office of Indian films: 2 billion dollars — a billion for Hindi, the rest for regional films. Lord of the Rings or a Frozen kind of franchise does that kind of business by itself. The other problem is that of experimentation, and I don’t mean “experimental filmmaking.” I personally prefer commercial films myself. But you can’t experiment even within this mainstream space — no new actors, directors etc. The cost of failure is too high. For instance, a film like Baar Baar Dekho right now has been made for a budget so high that if this was a new producer’s first film, they’re done forever. It’s not a sustainable business because innovation is not encouraged. You’re not allowed to take risks. And without taking these risks, there’s no way to know what works. Both, the film and TV distribution models, don’t encourage anything out of the ordinary. A 5000-screen film, which is a big release for a big film in India, covers a whole variety of demographics across all tastes — and it’s trying to cater to each one of them; and it should, given it has been mounted on such a scale. It invariably ends up being a terrible film because of this ambition. And if you make a 1000-screen film, your box-office collections suffer. The economics never seem to work either way. Should I be a small studio and try interesting content or should I be a massive mass-production factory? People often wonder why guys like Salman and Shah Rukh Khan do certain kinds of films, but the problem is the business forces them to do that. It’s not like they’ve suddenly forgotten what good cinema is; they’re educated and have more film exposure than a lot of us combined. You see, it’s not an art; it’s a commercial field where people have to work. If the business model doesn’t work, the enterprise fails. And the smaller the ecosystem then gets, the lesser innovation will be valued. Google is able to innovate because they have Search. It brings in the money, which they can put into other experiments. Something comes off once in a while. But that’s not the case here. Even though TV is/was in a better space, they’ve stopped trying different things too. Each channel is catering to a similar audience, where the prime 9 PM slot has to appeal to everyone.

Ashwin: To cut a long story short, we decided — because of all this — that film isn’t the right medium for us. Digital became an opportunity for us to present talented creators through a focused channel. We already have an understanding of tech and social platforms. The only way to do that in India is to create original content. So the easiest thing to do first up, while respecting our film and storytelling DNA, was a multi-episodic show. As soon as we thought of that, TVF had already begun rolling out their first few shows, and succeeding. This only validated our idea. We had loved their content, and now they were thinking in the same space too. So this was one way to start telling stories, at low costs, and get advertisers to subsidise that because we’d have measurable reach.
We discovered along the way that a lot of people were also consuming content on their cellphones much more. They were discovering content on social platforms; Youtube was actually starting to decline. People now went on there only for specific content. So first, we also needed to have short-form content, because people consume on the go in the car and trains. They won’t be watching 40-minute episodes. And secondly, how to let people discover this content? Facebook seemed like an interesting platform. One can actually propagate content to his/her friends by simply hitting the ‘share’ button. Youtube didn’t support that because there was no social component to it. So we decided that between all the long-form storytelling and web shows, we’d need to have a lot of short content to keep subscribers entertained in between: videos, text, anything. So we started Dice Media for this in mid-2015, and made our first series, a mockumentary comedy called Not Fit. We did some sketches too — Ban Ban, a timely satire that tapped into public sentiment because of some bizarre new ban rule the government had passed. We released it on Facebook, and it flew. It had 1 million page views in 4 days. It just happened on its own, without us putting any money into it. Facebook called us saying they had come across us through the viral video. They themselves said that we had reaffirmed their own faith in the timeline, because clearly recommendations were working. The network chain it created was tremendous. That was a great debut, a first-ball six. Now could we do it for the rest of the over? The pressure was on. We did something called Neta Sabki Leta, a series that Mihir Desai had directed. It didn’t have the same kind of numbers, but again got a lot of love from people who watched it.

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Anirudh: In fact that was one of the first times we saw our content getting pirated a lot. And someone actually forwarded it to me on Whatsapp. It was strange…

Ashwin: It didn’t go viral, but those who watched it had very interesting things to say about it. We then began to understand the difference between ‘watchable’ content and ‘shareable’ content. This got watched and not shared, but Ban Ban got watched and shared. Then we wanted to get into the psychology of sharing content. Stuff like web-series are not shareable; even TVF’s biggest shows like ‘Pitchers’ and now ‘Tripling’ don’t have much of a web timeline. It’s just the nature of the content. So we created FilterCopy as our second platform designed to create *only* shareable content. It focuses on doing formats that you’ve seen before. We’re not showing you something new, but something hopefully in a manner that’s more relatable and conversational and hits much harder than the other stuff out there. We tried a lot of formats for the first 3 months. Some of them were unwatchable, some watchable, but none shareable. At one point, we did a video called Delhi Guys in Bombay. It did very well for us at the time. There was another show called News Darshan, that Mithila Palkar used to host, and Kartik Krishnan used to write and direct. But again, people would wait for it every Friday, but nobody was sharing it. It got a lot of views though, around 50000-80000 per episode. But the Delhi guys video suddenly hit 300,000. We spent some time studying this trend. FilterCopy alone did around 90-95 million views last year, and 97% of our views is totally organic, which was a phenomenal number for this platform.
Meanwhile in Dice Media, we did Not Fit, put out the trailer and the first two episodes. A lot of people loved the show and wanted to be associated. The most interesting call came from TVF, who were launching their app TVFPlay and didn’t have any content of their own to launch it with because Permanent Roommates 2 hadn’t started. So we licensed the show out to them for two weeks — where every episode would be on the app for two weeks, and then sit on our Youtube and Facebook platforms. It was positively reviewed and did reasonable numbers.

not fit

Anirudh: Out of all the things, ‘Not Fit’ taught us the willingness to collaborate with other people. TVF and us agreed that an ecosystem needs to be formed here. You cannot compete before there’s something to compete for. It’s the only way this digital space will evolve. The market is new. Many were surprised and wondered why we collaborated with our ‘competitors’. Well, firstly, they’re competitors in a technical sense but way ahead of the game. Secondly, we ensure that in the future we do things together. Tomorrow we can even make a film together, not only with them but with others in the space. Now that same show ‘Not Fit’ is playing on a major TV channel (NDTV Prime). That just shows that an ability to collaborate mostly results in good things.

Ashwin: We were also able to prove the importance of a low-cost model for content experimentation. It was innovative in the sense, because it wasn’t a traditional show with the use of documentary-styled camerawork in the fiction space. We’ve seen it in the West, nothing revolutionary about it, but here it was new. By testing it digitally and having considerable success, you have mainstream television saying they want to put it up. We learned in that sense that one can create content on specific platforms and migrate it to more expensive platforms. We do that even on FilterCopy; shoot it on snapchat DIY in the office, and see what the reactions are: if it’s shit, it disappears in no time, but if it’s good, we’re onto something and will sit and write down an idea for a proper FilterCopy video. We did this video called ‘Different types of people taking exams’: stuff like the guy who copies, the guy who is too sincere, and other such tropes. It did very well on Snapchat, so we decided to make the sketch and put it on FilterCopy. In terms of web series, we’re finished our second, Little Things, after taking it easy for the first half of the year with all the noise in the space. Anyone and everyone was doing a web series. I think we, as an industry, have the tendency to overdo and ruin good things.

Anirudh: Also, for a longer-form product, you need to have the right distribution channel. You can’t just put out a show anywhere and expect people to watch it.

Ashwin: That’s the trend, right? A lot of creators have done three to five shows, but their pages don’t have any traction. They’re spending a ton on making and buying the content, and there’s no real way to measure how a thing has worked. Million views? That’s no measure, because you can put in money and bump up those views.

Anirudh: Engagement levels on these shows tend to be low. We have videos with 100,000-150,000 comments and even more shares. Those numbers are huge. Normal videos tend to get 10,000-20,000 comments, and that’s real engagement, not inspired by any click farms — real people commenting and discussing stuff. The key is how does one get that kind of conversation going for long-form content. That’s why we were very focused for the first part in building up FilterCopy, because it’s not just a content but also a distribution platform. We let people see and discover things through it.

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Ashwin: A good example is our next series, Little Things. For some context first, we did two videos earlier this year called ‘Confusing things girlfriends say’ and ‘Annoying things girlfriends do,’ and they did insane numbers. Some of the biggest in India. The girl was again Mithila Palkar, and the guy was Dhruv Sehgal, who was also the writer on them. They got so much engagement that we decided to take these two and try something more ambitious with them. Little Things is the result. Every web series dealing with a relationship tends to be about the five key moments — coming of age, met the girl, weddings, divorce, all the seminal moments in a life. But 95% of your life is not about that. It’s like today, where we come in, chat, and do nothing remarkable. It’s these little moments. That’s what the series is about — not about the good things or the important moments, but the things we don’t recognise while they happen. It’s an ambitious concept about unambitious things.

Anirudh: It’s also an attempt to communicate to the audience that it’s okay to be normal. You don’t have to be a rockstar, go through heartbreak and go through the most epic love all the time.

Ashwin: I’m actually bored of the stories of guys who quit their jobs to pursue their dream. Been there, done that, many times over. What about the everyday things? The day you get a little tipsy and go home to dance to your favourite track — stupid shit like that which you’d never obviously tell your friends about or post as Facebook statuses. But these things happen. And we’re showing them now. We’re trying to use FilterCopy as a marketing platform for it. Content is a Dice Media thing, and FC will present the content and help drive the noise. Both the actors, Mithila and Dhruv, are big FilterCopy stars. That’s where they’ve made their name. We have other things lined up for the year, too; trying our hand at a few more genres.

Anirudh: Going back to our philosophy, all of these are experiments for us. I don’t have a magic board to tell you if something is a hit or a flop. I don’t even know what that means anymore, to be honest. For example, with Facebook videos, there’s now autoplay. So a lot of people have views, but how many have great completion rates? We track this internally and run the company like that — a quantitatively-driven organisation that respects the creatives tremendously. Writers should see where the audiences are dropping off. That’s a way to improve, too. They should know whether a certain tool they’ve used worked or not. But nobody can tell you what to make and why, just like nobody can tell you a magic formula to keep making money in the stock markets. There is no constant hit-making machine. The key is to make them at a price so that tomorrow, if it works, great, but if it doesn’t you’re not out of business. You can try something else then. As a company, we believe in hiring a lot of young people. Out of 30-odd here, we were only around 15 for the last year, and generated so much content through them that it amazes so many film people who’ve been doing nothing in the last two years except waiting and writing scripts. Young folks come with new ambitions, want to experiment, aren’t afraid to fail, and have a voice that can be very important in this age. These are the kind of people who understand this generation, who will define the kind of digital content we will see over the next decade. Interestingly, when we started last year, not many knew what a “web series” was. People were not even doing what they do now: repurposing film scripts to fit the web format…

Ashwin: …which we believe is a waste of time and money.

Anirudh: Yes. I think every story doesn’t have to be told as a film. Some are better told in 20 minutes, some in 3 minutes; that’s the power of digital. There is no limit. The problem is the way people reformat a 120-minute script and divide it into four parts for the digital space. That’s not how it works. There’s a different storytelling structure to this medium. Sometimes we’re pitched film scripts, and we lose interest — not because they aren’t good. We’ve told the creator that this can ONLY be a film. It’s a close-ended thing. This is what causes the noise around the space recently. Many will struggle over the next few years — especially with the basics, right at the grassroots trying to figure out what this “business” is really about.

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Do you mean this bubble will burst eventually?

Ashwin: Let’s analyse the business model around this. Let’s break it down: there are the platform guys, and there are the advertising guys. The reality now is that the platform guys are also the ad guys, but that’s another story. When you go to an advertiser and ask for X amount of money to make a show, you’re actually telling him: give me the money and I’ll put your brand in front of X amount of audiences. And hopefully, create engagement — which is what we’ve been on about. You see, an advertiser has an option to create a TVC for some amount of money, put it on a bunch of TV channels for some more money, and then hope that some are engaged by it. The reality, as we know from our TV watching habits, is that people tune out during the TVC. An ad break is annoying; you take a break and flip channels at this point. There is zero measurable engagement on an ad in traditional television media. What you’re providing in digital media is an ability to measure that engagement. For example, if the video is 10 minutes long, and half tuned out beyond a minute, and the ad comes in at the 7th minute, it’s easy to say how *many* watched the ad. But a lot of creators aren’t going for that kind of thinking right now. It’s simple for them: “we have a million views, look”. That does not mean that the ad will automatically get a million views too. This doesn’t mean a million people watched the full episode. Various metrics like this are getting lost in this communication. Just like we do with every industry, we’re starting to make it all about the magic number. A 100-crore film in Bollywood is now the 1-million mark digitally. We don’t subscribe to this. A million views with low engagement is nothing compared to lesser views with high engagement. So a lot of advertisers, unknowingly in these models, are paying for no engagement. At some point, they will recognise this lack of value. And they will look for alternate mediums then.

Anirudh: Analytics for us are very important. There’s nothing wrong in giving advertisers access to these numbers. We’ve spoken to a few about this, and their reasoning is that platforms like Netflix don’t provide data. What they don’t understand is that Netflix is a different model — a subscription-based one.

Ashwin: And provide to whom? Netflix doesn’t owe them data. People are simply paying them for their content. At the end of the month, they know how many subscribed to them and how many they lost. They have only one number to look at. For them it’s important that whoever watches their show stays on the platform and watches something else. So as I said, there’s a lack of thought behind people jumping onto the digital bandwagon without knowing how things work.
And I don’t think it’s a bubble that will burst, to answer that question. I just think there are a whole lot of creators right now, and it’s a matter of time before advertisers realise the value they get. Pricing will then come down, and there will be an element of performance-based pricing then. They will then begin to pay only if you can actually perform, and churn out watchable content. This will separate the wheat from the chaff. And you’ll see somebody like TVF sitting on the top again, getting all the money because they have real audiences. They’ve done it the right way with some awesome content.

For people who’re outsiders, can you break down the financial revenue model you follow?

Ashwin: We’re venture funded. It simply means I’m getting tomorrow’s money today.

Anirudh: Also, they’re partners. So they provide the capital, and you build something for them that provides the returns.

Ashwin: In terms of the types of revenue models, it’s still evolving. The most common model is the advertiser-funded model: ramp placement, product integration or title sponsorship. We’ve done that, too. With ‘Not Fit,’ we basically created a matchmaking app called Voo, integrated it into the storyline, and the lead characters even have a competition about who can generate more matches.

Anirudh: On Little Things, we have a few different sponsors too. It’s done in a traditional TV style, in the sense different sponsors get different slots. Except, unlike traditional TV, the ad is in the content, so you can’t actually skip through.

Ashwin: It’s part of the content, more like entering a conversation v/s interrupting a conversation.

Anirudh: And that way, all incentives align together. It’s not as simple as “Oh, give that slot to any product.” You don’t have a Coke ad playing during a Pepsi IPL telecast. At the same time you have to create the scene around the ad engaging enough so that viewers don’t stop watching the series. It’s a challenge for both parties. So the positive view is: it’s the next generation of advertising. We already have interest from advertisers for our next two series, fortunately.

Ashwin: The other aspect of revenue is content syndication. We licensed our content in the past, and have now put it on television too. We’re likely to do more of this. As you build a good property and do more seasons, a lot can be done with it: merchandising etc. Content players in the West have done this very well — the way they create content and identify multiple revenue streams. We were the first, similarly, to do ‘windowing’ in content: with TVF first and then FilterCopy.

Anirudh: We own the IP on everything we do. That’s the difference between what we’re doing and what the Balajis of the world did. Balaji (Telefilms) created valuable content. It became the lifeline of Indian television. But a lot of that IP sits with Star TV. You simply become a service provider like that.

Ashwin: In our case the content creator, even if its not in-house, also owns something. Not Fit isn’t written by an employee of the company, just a frequent collaborator, but he owns a piece of that IP too.

So you guys then keep a watch on the medium across different languages and channels?

Ashwin: Yes, of course. For example, we love the work and Facebook channel of the Bharatiya Digital Party (BDP), and we’ve been discussing a possible collaboration with them. Our company itself is pretty diverse as far as employees are concerned, too. We speak multiple languages, and everyone is watching content across the table. That’s how we identify someone worth collaborating with.

Anirudh: Coming back to the revenue discussion, we also have a publishing business which does very well, with very high engagement. And unlike some of the bigger publishing houses in this country, we actually tell our readers that something’s being written in partnership with someone. We think it’s the way to go. Nothing wrong with that. In lifestyle content, the old way of thinking about journalism — the entire separation of church and state — needs some kind of balance. It’s different if I’m reporting on some corruption scandal where our brand is involved. This is in addition to the short-video and web-series business.

Ashwin: We also have a food-content channel called Gobble. We do food-based articles and quick video content, which sit on a separation section of the FilterCopy website. The page has grown tremendously. In fact, it’s bigger than Dice Media at this point.

Along with the two actors you talked about, I’m guessing you groom writers and creators too. Is there a concern to hold onto that talent, who might obviously be getting offers from elsewhere?

Ashwin: It’s not a concern. Let’s look at Mithila Palkar, for instance. Before she did News Darshan with us, she did a supporting role in a mainstream film, Katti Batti (Kangana Ranaut, Imran Khan). As far as we were concerned, she was brand new. Her popularity has obviously skyrocketed since then, but that can only be helped by the other work she’s doing. Because she does something like Girl in the City for Bindaas and Official Chukyagiri for Arre, it’ll help when our series comes out, because by then more people have seen and liked her. There is an effort on our part to create content which she’s good for. We try to challenge her, too; the series, Little Things, is a bit out of her comfort zone, which only helps all of us grow together in this space.

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Anirudh: There are obviously others in the market who believe in restricting their talent from working elsewhere. But I think it’s restrictive for the growth of the industry on the whole. If you’re an actor and work with a big production house, and you then work with other people, it can only help everyone. The whole “I made him/her a star; they will work with us” philosophy is silly. They’re not slaves. You have to treat them with the respect afforded to you. As long as you’re getting quality work, I don’t see a problem. But it’s different on the writing side: we make sure that they work in-house with us. A lot of them have been incentive-ized within the firm, too — like being offered a part of the company.

Ashwin: Think of it as a tech start-up, because that’s how we’re running it. I don’t think writers have a stake in the company anywhere else, except perhaps TVF. Here, that involves most of the technicians too. I would rather own a smaller share of a huge company than a larger share of a small company. For the industry to grow, everyone has to think about it. So, for writers, we prefer keeping them in-house, because a lot of our short-form content isn’t just pure art. Art meets Science, and the Science is learned in-house. We have a lot of data, analytics, and the writers are offered this information.
One of our newer guys — he was in college five months ago. He wanted to shoot a sketch, and this is probably the only place in the country where he can have a writer-director credit in the first four months after graduation. He did a video recently with Dice Media called Offline, and it did reasonably well. It got half a million organic views. He’s already getting recognised for his work. Now that kind of environment for a writer is great. It’s not like he’s some creative genius and we snatched him up — he’s very talented, but he also had access to so much data, to see what is working and what isn’t. In fact, he realised on the edit that there were a lot of things he could have done better, and he went and shot patchwork on it. The data helped him do things more carefully. So we use this approach, and it’s hard to do it when you have writers from the outside.

Anirudh: To us, production is a science. There are costs that need to be contained. It’s actually a delivery service if you do it in an efficient manner. The problem with the old studio-freelancer version of the world is: three of us work together, we learn something and then we go our own ways. Learning at an organisational level is completely lost. If you’re a writer and you join company X in the film or TV world, there’s an orientation that happens for three months, where you write, figure out things. But from the writing workshops I’ve seen, I feel like people are just writing things. Here, we’re making things. We’re seeing what the audiences are saying. I don’t have to sit on a high horse and lecture them what content is about. They learn on their own.

Ashwin: What is still in practice at most creative houses is ‘The Hippo effect’ — the highest paid person’s opinion. “I am the CEO or owner of the company, so what I say goes. Nothing else.” In reality, this can only lead to a lack of innovation. Here, a creative team sits on it. One of the guys put it well in a recent offsite we had: the minute I write a script, it’s my script. But the moment I enter the office and put it on the table, it belongs to everyone and what emerges from there is not mine anymore. He said it in a good way. You see, people come with their own sets of basics and principles. The moment we’re making a FilterCopy video, they know the rules that we apply to such content. We know the audiences who react. And everyone applies their principles there. This can only happen if the journey has been taken together.

 

What would be your advice to those who’d like to start something like you did?

Anirudh: The first piece of advice: just start it. Because the more educated you get, the more analysis you’ll do, and the less you’ll actually end up doing. That’s a regular problem. So just start, first. You’ll only find out once you do it. Once you’ve done some work, if it intuitively feels right, just do it.

Ashwin: And we learned this the hard way. We spent so long developing content last year, and by the time we released it, so many shows had already come out elsewhere. We should have just made our show. Why were we sitting around and overanalysing the way we were making it? It can never be perfect. But it has to be tried. Quickly.

Anirudh: Also remember that the audience is your friend. The content is advertiser funded, and we get suggestions from people all the time on how to make our content better. Sometimes we even take in the guy who gives useful suggestions and bring him on board as an advisor.

Ashwin: The second thing I’d say is, think from first principles and question everything. This industry is built on incorrect assumptions. That is steeped in Indian culture, which is steeped in Indian mythology. If we track it down to its root, we are a culture that is used to saying, “Oh, woh toh chalta hai.” We don’t question things enough, and we aren’t encouraged to do so. We learned very early on to question every basic assumption. Just because somebody says something doesn’t mean it is that way. Go down to the first principles of everything. Question “why” it works a certain way. For example, Anirudh was interviewed recently by some TV channel who came to the office to do it. It had an 11-person crew that came for a fixed tripod shot of him speaking. How does that minimise content costs in any way? Our company was 12-15 people for most of last year.

Anirudh: We’ve had a few big film stars call us and say, “your content is great. Let’s better the production value and work together.” People find excuses to escape into this dream world all the time. Our digital model will break if we start making expensive stuff.

Ashwin: I mean, we even shoot things on a cellphone sometimes. For that Delhi-Bombay video, it was a static cellphone — you won’t find any movement there. We are focused on the content experience: on the phone, all you need is a good quality of sound, and if you have dialogues, subtitles help it travel out of the country. Stick to those basics first.

Anirudh: Look, you can experiment, and we’re willing to pay, but don’t use failure as an excuse. It’s okay to fail and learn and try again.

Ashwin: Another thing is to learn even from your successes. We’ve started to do that. We look at some of our content and say, “hey, why did this work?” For instance, we did Ban Ban, but we didn’t repeat it.

Anirudh: It’s the scariest thing actually, which leads to a lot of insecurity. If you don’t know why you’ve succeeded, you have a problem. If you don’t know why people are coming to you, what’s the point?

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Where do you guys see this heading? Long-term plans? Something of a Netflix, maybe?

Ashwin: You can’t be a Netflix. Only Netflix can be a Netflix. For us, we don’t think too long-term, because we have to look for avenues of growth and find new formats.

Anirudh: If you’re building a new platform today, you shouldn’t aspire to be an Amazon or Netflix. Unless you’re something different, or game-changing, or you’ve identified an audience base, there’s no point because with them coming into the game, a lot of production will go out of the window. It’s changed quickly.

Ashwin: Why does an average user use Netflix? It’s not like the user wants to pay. He’s paying for a reason — but why? He goes on and can choose from a variety of content. In India, a user has to visit avenues like Hotstar, Viacom, Zee etc. for the kind of content he/she wants to watch. It’s too much sometimes, so often we end up just going to our friendly neighbourhood torrent website instead and simply download what we need. Who wants to have to decide where to subscribe or log on to? Nobody. Netflix and Amazon have a huge tech advantage in India over other players…

Anirudh: And players that aren’t appreciated enough are Facebook and Youtube. They have a bigger distribution base than anyone else. And reach is everything in this medium. Tomorrow, someone like PayTM or Bookmyshow has a much better of chance of becoming a Netflix than any of these new guys out there.
Long-term wise, a few trends will happen and there’s no stopping that. The question is how to make your micro-business play along with those trends? How does one still remain relevant? Because everyone is going to have a phone screen, which makes for a different mode of entertainment from what television was. The penetration of smartphones and data rates will improve. Access to the internet is a great equaliser. The whole “they watch this in Patna, but not this in Delhi” cohorts will disappear. Someone who likes Rohit Shetty may also like House of Cards. These are the kind of cohorts that advertisers want to see. For example, our office manager was a lift boy in another building. One day on his Whatsapp, I saw Jay Z’s picture. I wondered how he was listening to that kind of music. He had a phone and internet, that’s how. He had exposure to something that I, a fairly middle-class kid growing up, got exposure to much later in life. He finds these things on Facebook.

Ashwin: Last month, I took a vacation to visit my friends in Zurich. When I told him that, he immediately said that’s where the Swiss Alps are. How did he know this? Access to information, obviously, to even NatGeo and Discovery videos.

Anirudh: So today when we identify the TRPs for various content, we should also look at the torrents being downloaded. That’s where most of India is watching stuff. How do you think people are watching Game of Thrones? People will have less time during the day as we move forward, and they want to snack on content — these are simple trends. People want access when they want it. You can’t control that according to 9 or 10 pm time slots anymore. Which is why portals like Snapchat are such an effective medium. We have a big Whatsapp channel too. Because the kinds of things people like and watch on whatsapp is different from what they do on Facebook. Web-series is a very small product in the wider section of entertainment.

And tomorrow if two of our guys go on to create a company, good for everyone, because we can also invest in that. That’s the way forward. The other founders of Facebook have created their own companies and are very successful in their own spaces. This culture of creation is very important. Because we aren’t sure of the trends; it’s difficult to predict who and what the next Netflix is. But remember that brand loyalty is very low for platforms; where is BBM and Nokia now? Platforms are an evolving thing, and I think people underestimate that.
To sum it up: Our vision is to be a leader in entertainment, and at a micro-level, create a space where creators feel safe. There’s nothing more priceless than security and respect for artists. Whoever we become and however long it takes, this philosophy — at a grass-root level — cannot be forgotten.

Channel links: DICE MEDIAFILTERCOPY