MUMBAI: Indian content has a domestic comfort problem. That, in essence, was the diagnosis Sameer Nair, managing director of Applause Entertainment, offered at Content India 2026, a fireside conversation at Taj Lands End in Mumbai that touched on micro-dramas, AI animation, data-driven formulae and the stubbornly local character of Indian streaming.

Nair was characteristically candid. India’s content industry, he argued, has historically been too busy feeding a vast domestic market to bother going global. “The crossover that happens is really to the Indian diaspora rather than to the non-Indian area,” he said. Streaming changes that equation, he added, but only if Indian creators are willing to compete on production quality with the shows sitting two slots away on a global platform.

At Applause, the pivot is already under way. The company, best known for premium scripted drama, is now moving into films. “Movies give you theatrical, a sense of electric revenue, you can expand the business a lot more,” Nair said. Animation is also on the agenda, though the approach has shifted sharply. “We spent some time trying to develop traditional animation. But now we are doing it using AI. That’s been a key pivot.”

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Micro-drama is next on the list. Nair admitted to being something of a convert, confessing he had lost 20 to 30 minutes to a show about a CEO fighting off a boardroom coup before he knew what had happened. The format, which has exploded out of China and is now sweeping the US and UK, appeals to him precisely because it demolishes the myth of the shrinking attention span. Audiences, he argued, will watch a game of cricket for three hours or sit through a glacial episode of Landman without complaint, as long as the content holds them.

On data, Nair was sceptical of the industry’s growing addiction to algorithms. Data spots patterns, he acknowledged, but audiences spot patterns too. “Whatever data sees as a trend, audiences are also catching up with it.” The result, he warned, is a drift towards formula, and formula, however reliable, eventually bores people. His counterexample was Adolescence, the stripped-back Netflix drama that topped the platform’s India charts. “It went small but it went really deep. You don’t have to have a massive canvas to paint a picture.”

The commercial reality behind all of this was not lost on him. With most streamers outside Netflix still loss-making, the industry is caught between the prestige model that built streaming and the harder-working, lower-cost programming that platforms increasingly want. “Content creation can’t be a charitable exercise,” he said. “There must be profit because then that sort of goes back home.”

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On the bigger question of geopolitics and what audiences want from their screens in unsettled times, Nair offered a characteristically sly answer. The job, he said, is to tell stories that “you’re not supposed to tell, but tell them anyway.”

For an industry that has spent decades telling people what they want to hear, that may be the most radical proposal of all.

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