Three Defining Moments In Indian Cinema

India is the second largest consumer of movies in the world behind China in terms of the tickets sold. The Media and Entertainment industry in India is expected to collect a 39.68 billion USD in the 2018-2023 fiscal year currently valued at 22.28 billion USD. These facts suggest that almost every household in India is a consumer in one way or the other. Now let’s look at three big changes that lead to burgeon in this field.

1)The beginning

In 1913 the story telling format in India took a new turn, Dadasaheb Phalke made a silent feature called, “Raja Harishchandra”. Back then it was considered a taboo for woman to act in films and Dadasaheb Phalke had a cast a male actor in a female’s role.Within the next two decades a mammoth number of 200 films were produced every year! But India had to wait a solemn 18 years from the release of “Raja Harishchandra” to get its first sound film, “Alam Ara”.

2)The digital wave

In the year 2003 ‘Nil Nirjane’ got released and set the tone for digital films in India. Previously Indian films used digital in bits and pieces but it was ‘Nil Nirjane’ which was a full length Digital film. The conventional filmmakers were sceptical about it at first as the use of “films” had its own set of pros which couldn’t be matched by the digital like, the “black and white” were more better in the former, but evolution is inevitable and they had to evolve and so did they. The use of Digital levelled everyone and people could now shoot films on their mobile phones. Accompanied by the booming of internet around this time, movies were now not only restricted to theatres or Televisions. This lead to piracy and it’s the battle that is being fought till date.

3)Anytime any where

Sensing the market in internet for movies a bunch of streaming platforms such as Hotstar, Prime Video, Netflix etc intervened the market. They offered choices in movies, place and time, gave access to multiple devices just like what all pirated websites did but these were legal. A Few of these were free or in most of the cases the audiences could sign up for a free trail. After the positive response from audience now there are exclusive features being made just for these streaming platforms. This further strengthened streaming platforms and online streaming platforms are now seen as the only way to battle piracy.