A decade between Kolkata and Dhaka!

The numbers speak for themselves as Vishnu Kant Mohta cofounder of the OTT platform Hoichoi spells it out to me ldquoThere are 90 million Bengali speakers in West Bengal And 180 million in Bangladesh with a global Bengali diaspora much vaster than West Bengalrsquos The HQ of Hoichoi should then be in Dhaka not KolkatardquoThat hasnrsquot happened yet what with ldquoBangladesh still behind on the digital distribution curve without Jio and UPI for tailwinds But itrsquoll happen maybe 10 years later Thatrsquos how I wanna get my organisation to thinkrdquo Mohta saysLiterally Hoichoi is a Bengali onomatopoeic word for a loud uproarnoise Itrsquos the onestop app for all things Bengali entertainment filmsseriesRecently Mohta got invited by IIM Ahmedabad with Hoichoi inducted as a casestudy where he spoke of being a man of numbers in a world of visualswordsVishnu Kant Mohta cofounder of HoichoiI was in Kolkata for Hoichoirsquos snazzy starry 10th year anniversary mdash with a banger of a trailer after another for its content slate mdash and I could see what the hullabaloo over 200 web series with a billion hours of watchedcontent in 100plus countries is aboutAnd why a Bengali streaming service was the answer to global majors that nobody gave when it matteredConsider the content economy as I saw it from Mumbai in 2016 Itrsquos when the ecommerce giant Amazon Prime Video former videorental library Netflix and a TV broadcaster Hotstar launched OTT platforms in IndiaWhat was the local movie industryrsquos response to this thoroughly disruptive new medium Radio silence Sure the major production houses in Mumbai the likes of Yash Raj Films Dharma etc do have a digital arm But itrsquos mainly to serve as vendors for the said OTTsBack in Kolkata Mohta and his brothers at the popular film studio Shree Venkatesh Films SVF producing Bengali movies since the late 1990s and content for television channels circa 2008 onwards were on the drawing board attempting to solve an altogether another commercial puzzleWhich is That as producers yoursquore in the ldquoB2B business dealing with distributors producers broadcastershellip You never directly own a rupee of the customerrsquos walletrdquo How did they intend to change thatGoing two seemingly opposite directions One analogue ie brickandmortar mdash opening ldquominiplexesrdquo in every district of West BengalTwo the OTT As Mohta who led this digital division puts it ldquoThe Internet business is about owning the wallet mdash what else is BookMyShow Uber Zomato Swiggyhelliprdquo Straight off Hoichoi began with annual subscriptions a huge punt alreadyThat as a film company SVF had cracked television production which is rare even in the reverse made owning an OTT a natural step but in hindsight of courseSpeaking to Mohta I can tell hersquos a Steve Jobs fan mdash not just for the portrait in his cabin that I notice over a Zoom call but that he regularly refers to Jobs talking about how ldquoadversity creates opportunity everything happens for a reasonrdquo and that you can always connect dots of your own story only in retrospectMohtarsquos family firm SVF started out as film distributors mdash Mani Ratnamrsquos Bombay 1995 being their first big success But they branched out to production ldquobecause you canrsquot own your destiny as distributorsrdquo Likewise with forays into other allied fields including OTT Which evidently equals content production at ginormous rate plus scaleMohta calls web series as ldquosomething with the quality of film but the discipline of televisionrdquo Hyderabadrsquos top producer Allu Aravind had once told me about how Hoichoi had basically set up his Telugu OTT app AhaMohtarsquos point ldquoIt would take globalnational OTTs a long time to devise a regional content strategyrdquo It took him three months to execute Aha He holds a stake in itBut hersquos clear about Bengal being his core business ldquoWe donrsquot want to be everything to everyone but everything to someone I always say for us itrsquos Bangladesh not Bandrardquo Thatrsquos his lookeast policyIn 2019 Mohta set up an office in Dhaka I only learnt from him that Indian films arenrsquot allowed to theatrically release in Bangladesh mdash not because of a law but local lobbiesHoichoi Studiorsquos Bonolota Express 2026 is the yearrsquos hugest blockbuster in Bangladesh and among the top three boxoffice successes of all timeKolkata of course has its own movie industry As per Mohta it went through a near terminal decline post the 1970s and that ldquoSVF was lucky and instrumental in reviving itrdquoSVF stars donrsquot work for Hoichoi Economics donrsquot add up Focus is on stories instead But Hoichoi content does release in theatres Basis the data the app is privy to This is unique for any Indian production houseTake the detective Eken Babu Mohta says ldquoThe actor Anirban Chakrabarti was unknown before this role and he doesnrsquot look like a conventional star eitherrdquoEken Babu has had a nineseason run on Hoichoi with multiple films as hits in theatres as a result The fourth film The Eken Keralae Kurukshetra is Bengalrsquos biggest Durga Puja release of 2026 Shubho Sharadiya at the cinemas too thenMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper