With more than 20 years of experience in the entertainment industry, the founder of VR Films and Studios recently launched their OTT platform – VROTT. Harping on their concept ‘Global ka Local app’, they describe VROTT as an Indian OTT platform which makes the world speak our local language.
Content in foreign languages like UK / Australian / US (English), Russian, Korean, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Norwegian, Swedish, Thai, Chinese, French etc is dubbed and localised in Indian language. The Indian languages include Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, and Gujarati.
Animation Xpress got in touch with VR Films and VROTT founder Manish Dutt and director Krishi Dutt to know more about the Indian OTT platform.
“With localization, language today is no longer a barrier to view content. Exciting genres like drama, thriller, suspense, horror and high octane action content available in the foreign languages was rarely exploited in India as the audience could not understand these languages. With VROTT, the Indian audience can experience this content in the language of their choice / they understand (AAP KI MAA KI BHASHA). This localized content will be exclusively available only on VROTT,” Manish said.
He further revealed that VROTT targets maximum exposure with the tier two and tier three cities with its localized content. Metro cities and elite ones too can access the content with English subtitles in case they are not comfortable with dubbed versions.
Talking about their content acquisition plan, Krishi said, “The international content mostly available in India was in English as other exotic languages were not understood by people. When we would travel to international film markets we would see such brilliant content in different languages of the world (films and series) but because of the language barrier we wouldn’t acquire such content then. Since VR Films was an established premier player in film acquisition/distribution and in dubbing/post production (having 75 dubbing studios across India) we strategised to launch our own OTT Platform “VROTT” and leverage our two existing verticals by acquiring and localizing content for it. This would make VROTT unique as it would showcase exotic unseen content from all over the world and provide this content to our young Indian audience in the languages they understood. In phase one we decided to localize in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu and launch VROTT and later in other Indian languages like Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi etc. Hence the concept originated ‘Global ka Local’. Also rather than watching and reading (subtitles), Indians prefer to watch and hear a film/series; and this was an important business insight for us to encash.”
VROTT will have films and series from the UK, Hungary, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Baltic, far east, Turkey, Korea, Russia, Australia and many more.
“Our USP is that the content acquired has never been exploited earlier on any media platform and will be available exclusively on VROTT only. We aim to premiere one new film and one new series every month. Probably next year we would create originals exclusively for VROTT subscribers,” the founder said.
They shared the diverse range of content available on the platform. Some of them are:
Hungarian film Postmortem (Hungarian nominee for this year’s Oscars), recent Korean superhit Hard Hit, Australian hit Sweet River, films from Hong Kong like Reset, White Storm 2, Thunder Chase; successful series from UK like Van Der Valk, Baptise, Innocent, Skins, Clique, Des, Deceit, The Deceived, Penance, White House Farm, etc.
There are Turkish hits like For love and Justice, Heartbeat, City of Secrets, Forever Bound, Untold Truth, Silent Storm, That is my Life; Spanish Hit Ana; Italian hit series like Maltese and Standing Tall; Swedish hits like Huss, Snow Angels, With one eye open, Agatha Christie’s Hjerson, Stockholm Requiem; Norwegian hits like Outlier, Heavy Water; Finnish content like Peacemaker, Welcome to Texas; Flemish hit Over Water, Ukrainian Hit Hide & Seek and French Hits like Beyond Appearances and Victor Lessard.
Along with these there are many series from Russia and the far east and from the above countries too. Our film library has Hollywood hits like Unhinged, Jolt, Dragon Blade, Survivor, Knock Knock, Gamer, Air Strike, The Courier, The Power, Poison Rose, Looking Glass, Target Number One and so on.
There are Korean hits like Master, Saigon Bodyguards, Spy Undercover, Fabricated City, Confidential Assignment, The Tower, Far East hits like Call of Heroes, Legendary Assassins, The Four, White vengeance, The Assassins, The Bodyguard, The Master, Sword Identity, Judge Archer and many more. The Icebreaker is a hit Russian show.
All the shows have high production value, interesting storyline and have been hits in their country of origin. Apart from above we have an impressive line-up of new films and series for 2022 waiting to be premiered in time ahead.
“Subscription packages have been designed to suit all pockets and easy affordability,” Manish said.
VROTT Super Saver is an annual plan (with three months complimentary) available at Rs 499. VROTT Smart is a six-month plan priced at Rs 299. VROTT Super Starter plan for three months is for Rs 199.
VR Films is a major aggregator of content for the Indian sub-continent comprising India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal and Bhutan. They strategically plan releases for each film on platforms like theatrical, satellite TV, VOD and digital space in this whole region.