Laughing all the way to the bank: why an Indian web parody on startups got 3 million views

Team of The Viral Fever which created startup spoof TVF Pitchers in India. Director Amit Golani – extreme right.

From the 13th floor of a Mumbai high rise, former Wall Street analyst Ashwin Suresh, 31, is trying to make India laugh though a parody series called Not Fit about struggling actors.

“Thousands of aspiring actors land in Mumbai every month, but very few land a lead role in any film. Their stories remain untold,” says Ashwin. ‘Not Fit’ is a term used to reject actors in an audition.

“Over the years, some of them become casting directors, some do ad films, while some others become extras,” he adds.

Out of Banking into Bollywood

Tired of his private equity job in the US, Suresh and his wife packed their bags for India to make movies in Bollywood in 2011 – much to the agony of their parents who had migrated to the West in the hope of a good life for their kids.

In 2013, he founded Pocket Aces, a digital movie studio which produces videos for the web. It got funded from Singapore-based Surya Ventures.

India’s strict TV and film censorship coupled with a boom in India’s internet usage set off a demand for uncensored video content. Digital channels such as Pocket Aces, The Viral Fever, Being Indian, All India Bakchod, and Fame Comdey have emerged in the last three to four years.

India now has over 402 million internet users, of whom about 300 million access the web through a smartphone, as many don’t have access to PCs or laptops. Videos are downloaded from the internet and filled in phone SD cards at kiosks in small towns, as many Indians still can’t afford data usage charges. A 3G pack from Airtel for a data download of 750 MB (a typical movie size) costs about US$4.4, compared to US$0.5 for a CD or memory card full of pirated movies, available at kiosks.

“The barriers to entry in the online video on demand are very less. But streaming video requires high fidelity networks with consistent speeds of at least 2-3 MBPS to deliver a buffer free experience,” says Rajiv Vaidya, India CEO of Spuul, a web-based platform for Indian video content, that has seen about 5 million downloads of its mobile app. “The expected launch of 4G services by the likes of Reliance Jio should reduce data costs in 2016,” adds Vaidya.

The Not Fit series, that went live this month on TVFPlay, an Android app platform of The Viral Fever, has already received about 240,000 views. Pocket Aces’s other video called Ban Ban, received over 3 million views in the wake of a series of bans by the new government in 2015. From instant noodles to porn, nothing was spared.

The spicy Indian version of HBO’s Silicon Valley

Mumbai-based The Viral Fever, which produced TVF Pitchers, India’s equivalent of HBO’s Silicon Valley series, received an average of over 2 million views of its videos, within weeks of upload on the internet this year.

“We had a startup TV series in mind since 2012, much before the Silicon Valley TV Series was born. When we saw a dramatic rise in investments in startups in 2013-15, we decided to chronicle this euphoria in India,” says Amit Golani, 28, director of TVF Pitchers.

TVF Pitchers is a story of four characters starting up on an idea, without any funding. The main hero rebukes his boss and resigns on phone, after downing a few pitchers of beer.

Season 1, which released this year, revolves around how families, bosses, and spouses typically react in India when the characters quit their cushy jobs to take to entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs and investors turn actors

No kissing or swearing on Indian TV