Nitin Gupta steps down as chief content officer of Chaupal OTT

DELHI: Nitin Gupta has called time on his three-year-and-three-month run as chief content officer of Chaupal OTT, the regional streaming platform, closing one of the more unlikely second-act stories in Indian digital entertainment.

Gupta came to Chaupal not as a seasoned OTT hand but as a radio man. He had spent over a decade at Mirchi, the country’s dominant FM network, rising from associate vice president to vice president over 11 years and five months, programming and shaping content for one of India’s most listened-to broadcast brands. Streaming was a different world entirely.

It was Sandeep Bansal, founder of Chaupal OTT, who made the call. Bansal spotted something in the audio veteran that others might have missed and handed him the reins of content at a platform built around Punjabi and Haryanvi language programming. The bet, by Gupta’s own account, paid off.

Over three years, Gupta helped steer Chaupal’s content strategy as the platform carved out a distinct identity in an OTT market dominated by deep-pocketed giants. The work was unglamorous in the way that building anything from the ground up tends to be: late nights, scrappy pitches, and the grinding work of assembling a team that could produce original content at scale.

Gupta, who holds a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication from Lovely Professional University, has described the stint as a wholesale reinvention, from FM frequencies and jingles to streaming algorithms and original productions.

He has not announced his next move, saying only that the next chapter is already in production.

In a media landscape where careers rarely travel in straight lines, Gupta has already proved once that the sharpest pivots can become the most interesting stories. Whatever comes next, the radio man turned streaming executive has earned the right to take his time scripting it.