'You’ve Got to Make the Indian ‘House of Cards’'

Today’s podcast is the final installment of our “What the World Watches” audio series recorded at Singapore’s APOS conference, for paid subscribers only. You can listen to earlier conversations with Formula 1’s Director of Media Rights and Content Creation Ian Holmes here, Warner Bros. Discovery International President Gerhard Zeiler here, and Media Partners Asia co-founder Vivek Couto here.

As the streaming industry continues on its quest for global manifest destiny, India, with its population of 1.4 billion people, remains arguably the biggest untapped market, with some estimating that the next 100 million customers will come from the country. Sameer Nair, CEO of production company Applause Entertainment, has had his finger on the pulse of the market since the 1990s, adapting U.S. content as well as producing originals for major regional players including Disney+ Hotstar, Amazon Prime, Zee, and Netflix. At the APOS conference in Singapore, The Wakeup’s Sean McNulty sits down with Mumbai-based Nair to discuss the recent introduction of “premium TV” to the region and the hand Netflix has had in developing it (1:58), the economics of producing content in a country with a low ARPU (10:24), and the role U.S. crime procedurals play in growing the market (12:43).