Anil Kapoor, the Bollywood star whom we first encountered in the Introduction, recently released his first Netflix film, Thar (2022, dir. Raj Singh Chaudhary), a Hindi-language neo-Western thriller. The above statement by Kapoor acknowledges the novelty of changes to the contemporary industrial structure in the age of streaming. In its current iteration, the Bollywood landscape has been rapidly transforming, with the film industry becoming increasingly ‘networked’ with global and local streaming platforms. The contemporary industrial ecosystem is teeming with streaming platforms, including vernacular regional, national, and global entrants like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. In India, these streaming services are referred to as ‘over-the-top’ (OTT) platforms because they bypass traditional media services and many regulatory constraints to reach consumers directly through the internet.

Kapoor’s comment reflects broad changes in the industrial landscape and Bollywood’s position and influence on globalized entertainment culture in the third decade of the twenty-first century. At the 2014 IIFA, the Tampa conference recounted in the Introduction, Bollywood was hoping to make a splash in the US, wherein stars like Kapoor, who had created some presence in the US market, were leveraged as anchors. The story of India’s Bollywoodized market and industrial network, however, only a decade later, appears strikingly different. Now we see Netflix pulling out all stops to create a strong presence in India, closely followed by Amazon Prime Video and Disney+. OTT platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are just the newest contenders. They have drastically altered the entertainment industry structure not just in India but also in Hollywood, where long-established conglomerate monopolies are being broken up or reconfigured. Through its multidirectional global ties, the Indian entertainment industry has been transforming into a veritable global network.