India’s Content Market Is Evolving: Investors Want Fewer, Bolder Stories

By Pickle November 10, 2025

Atul Phadnis, Founder-CEO of Vitrina, on the shifts transforming India’s film & TV landscape and how global funds can unlock new opportunities through data-driven partnerships. Atul Phadnis chats with Pickle

San Francisco Bay Area-based Vitrina is a leading global business intelligence and discovery platform for the video entertainment supply chain. It helps companies seeking to produce, finance, distribute, or service content find the right partners, projects, and decision-makers across 100+ countries.

With real-time tracking of film and TV projects and daily profiling of over 140,000 companies—including 90,000+ production houses and 10,000+ streamers and TV platforms—Vitrina empowers studios, producers, financiers, and vendors to identify credible collaborators, qualify opportunities, and close deals with speed and precision.

Vitrina is used by global streamers, studios, independents, content buyers, and service providers to bring data-driven clarity to partner discovery, co-production matchmaking, and international growth.

Atul Phadnis, Founder and CEO of Vitrina, describes it as a market network and intelligence platform that connects the global entertainment ecosystem across every stage—development, production, post, localization, distribution, and licensing. Vitrina AI was incubated at SRI International (Stanford Research) in Menlo Park, California.

Phadnis brings decades of expertise in content intelligence and global media supply chains. Previously Chief Content Officer at Gracenote and founder of What’s-ON, Atul has led large-scale media operations, high-value exits, and innovation in entertainment business networks. In this interview with Pickle, he shares his insights on the Indian investment climate, trends shaping 2025, and the keys to building successful cross-border content partnerships.

Q: As Vitrina’s Global Financing Partner for the CII M&E Investor Summit, how do you assess the current investment climate for film and TV content in India? Vitrina tracks real-time production financing trends worldwide. What are the top three global trends shaping 2025, and where does India stand in this landscape?

A: 2025 has been a year of recalibration, not retreat. Global production volumes are down 17%, but India has seen a steeper 30% drop—mainly due to a funding squeeze and higher selectivity in greenlighting. Yet, release volumes in India are down only 12.5% compared to the global average of 17%, indicating steady content momentum despite fewer project starts.

Importantly, the creative lens has sharpened. Investors are backing fewer but more thematically ambitious projects. In India, we’re seeing a pivot to identity and transformation stories, modern mythologies, and institutional critiques with mass appeal. Genre blending—action-fantasy-dramas, comedy-romances—and a renaissance in thrillers with morally complex characters are driving success. The rise of “Chapter 1” films signals a franchise and long-tail value mindset.

At Vitrina, we track this shift daily. While volume is down, quality, boldness, and IP-building potential are up. For investors, that’s a promising trade-off.

Q: How does Vitrina help global funds identify and connect with credible Indian production partners for co-productions and financing?

A: Vitrina makes global co-production scouting faster, smarter, and more precise. We track every major film and TV project worldwide and enable our members to connect with matched projects, companies, financiers, and decision-makers. Funds, studios, and streamers use Vitrina not just to discover partners but to qualify them with real-time, verified credentials and connect directly with the right people.

We offer discovery by genre, scale, financing history, and collaboration profiles; live tracking of projects in development and financing; verified contacts with specialization tags; and dedicated concierge outreach services. In a fragmented global market, we bring structure, speed, and reliability—helping funds move confidently from intent to conversation.

Q: What should international investors know about India’s content market today? What are the biggest opportunities, and what advice would you give global funds considering Indian investments?

A: India’s content market is powered by a young, mobile-first population and a deep cultural connection to storytelling. Three opportunity zones stand out:

Cinematic scale with theatrical loyalty: India’s cinema-going culture remains strong, especially for high-emotion, high-entertainment films, offering durable value for well-positioned titles.

Regional cinema with high ROI: Low-to-mid-budget regional films deliver outsized returns, with highly engaged audiences across languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, and Bengali.

Short-form & vertical drama: With 800M+ smartphone users, there’s exploding demand for mobile-first, snackable content—short dramas, clips, mini-series—that blend emotional impact and repeat value.

My advice: Treat India as a multi-market ecosystem, not a monolith. Deploy capital where there’s local depth, genre clarity, and audience alignment. Mapping the right regional collaborators and scalable IP is key to unlocking long-term value.

Q: Vitrina tracks projects across 100+ countries from development to release. For a global fund evaluating an Indian web series or film, how does your platform reduce risk compared to traditional, network-based approaches?

A: Vitrina replaces informal, relationship-driven deal-making with a structured, data-first approach. We map every major film and series worldwide—linking them to producers, financiers, partners, and decision-makers. Global funds can search partners by past deal history, regional focus, export success, genre, and project stage, plus access market intel on content demand and supply-chain.

We surface red flags early—lack of track record, incompatibility, or poor export appeal—so funds avoid wasting time. For high-potential projects, we help identify co-production fits, pre-buy opportunities, and financeable gaps, along with verified contacts for outreach. This enables more confident, informed decisions—grounded in data, not just relationships.

Q: Can you share examples of Vitrina’s successful collaborations with global production funds and companies?

A: We’re running multiple live mandates across feature and TV projects in development and pre-production, helping projects reach financiers, commissioners, and studio heads, and unlocking pre-buy opportunities to close financing gaps. Some examples:

A large publishing house with 50+ book IPs is working with us to adapt selected titles into major features or series.

A Korean digital-first animation hit is being positioned for adaptation on a mainstream global platform, with connections to streamers and studios.

We support projects from Canada, the UK, Poland, India, Dubai, Japan, Australia, and Nigeria—identifying co-pro partners or financiers suited to their scale, genre, and market fit.

Using real-time project tracking and AI-led matching, we help creators find the right partners for co-production, financing, or pre-sales.

Q: How does India’s talent ecosystem differentiate it from other markets when global investors evaluate production partnerships?

A: India offers several distinctive advantages:

Large, skilled workforce: Millions employed directly/indirectly in the sector, with a robust ecosystem of studios, vendors, and post/CGI/VFX talent.

Diverse linguistic and cultural storytelling: With 100+ languages and a huge domestic market, Indian creative talent is adept at working across formats, genres, and sensibilities.

Emerging service-hub credentials: Indian post, VFX, animation, and localization support have increasingly global credits and cost advantages, with a strong reputation for skills and client relationships.

Creative supply-chain scale: The volume of annual content production offers depth and breadth of experience.

Cost-efficiency: High production values at lower budgets, when managed well, are attractive to investors.

Q: Regional language content now dominates OTT platforms, with 86% of premium viewership for local stories. How does this diversity create unique opportunities for international funds?

A: Regional dominance is a strong positive for international funds:

Large addressable markets: Each regional audience (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, etc.) represents significant scale, producing domestic hits and attracting global interest.

High ROI potential: Many regional films are lower-budget but high-impact within their markets, opening up attractive economics for efficient capital deployment.

Risk diversification: Funds now have access to multiple regional “windows”, allowing diverse portfolios rather than a single-market bet.

In short, regional diversity leads to both volume and variety, enabling multi-bet portfolios across languages, regions, and formats.

Q: While India has seen global hits like RRR, Pathaan, and Kantara, these remain exceptions. Based on Vitrina’s deal tracking, what shifts are needed for India to become a consistent content exporter like South Korea?

A: Achieving consistent export success requires key shifts:

More globally-oriented IP development: Projects need export/multi-territory potential, universal themes, and high production value—not just domestic commercialization.

Stronger early-stage support: Leading exporters have robust commissions, grants, and incentives for global-ready projects. India’s ecosystem is growing, but less coordinated.

Better infrastructure and incentive parity: Improving access, transparency, workflow integration, and quality benchmarks is needed.

Stronger export-story mindset: Successful exporters have robust format industries; Indian TV/web series remain largely domestic.

Collaborative global co-productions: More structured partnerships with global studios/streamers, embedding global standards and partners early.

India’s scale and talent make this feasible, but it needs ecosystem maturation, a shift in mindset, and investment in export-orientation.

Q: If you were addressing Indian producers, directors, and studio heads at the CII M&E Investor Meet, what would be your core message about how global funds can become strategic partners—not just capital providers—for India’s next wave of content?

A: “Global funds aren’t just capital—they’re connectors. They bring export pathways, scale, and IP monetization models. Indian creators should think beyond the domestic market—structure globally, develop exportable IP, and collaborate early with international partners.”

Q: If you were speaking to international production fund executives at the CII M&E Investor Meet, what would be your core message about India’s potential and readiness for global collaboration?

A: “India is not just a high-volume market—it is a global production asset with rich supply-chain, world-class talent, cost efficiency, thriving domestic market, and rapidly growing audience ecosystems. For global funds willing to move beyond ‘one-off deals’, India offers a multilayered opportunity: invest in local production assets, co-productions, service-hub deals, IP-build for export, and adjacent monetisation.

Yes, there are structural gaps, but these are fixable risks. What matters is choosing the right partner, leveraging incentives, building export-ready formats early, and treating India as many markets, not one. The next phase of India-global collaboration is here—real, actionable and ready for investment.”