Purab Kohli: OTT platforms are trying to understand the likes and needs of their audiences

Actor Purab Kohli feels the strategy for OTT platforms both in India and abroad is to understand what exactly their viewers want, especially with increased demand during the Covid pandemic.

With the spike in Covid-19 cases, the present situation is eerily similar to that of 2020. People are again being advised to stay and work from home, so with shoots and theatres being affected, OTT platforms are taking centrestage again.

Actor Purab Kohli has been a part of web shows such as Sense8 and Out of Love.

Purab Kohli, who had jumped on to the OTT bandwagon when these platforms hadn’t even come to India, says the scene here is now similar to what’s happening globally. “It’s similar in the way the platforms are monitoring and trying to understand the likes and needs of their audiences and commissioning content to satisfy that demand, and it’s as different as the audiences of each country that the platform is distributing its content in. Of course there is always some content that crosses over,” he says.

The 42-year-old has been a part of web shows such as Out of Love and Sense8. The second season of the former will also be out soon. A film, Blind is also on the cards for him, but all he says about that is, “I’m super excited about the film and there will be a lot to say when it’s due to release. And yes Sonam (K Ahuja, co-star) is gorgeous.”

“That’s a tough one to answer. To me it’s all the same, just the distribution is different. Cinema, TV and now internet is where I work my craft. Out of the four projects I worked on in the past year, two are films for the cinemas, one was a film for an OTT platform and one a web series,” says the actor.

The pandemic has changed a lot of things, right form how projects are shot, to how the content is consumed. Kohli reveals one thing he misses the most shooting in the current times is, “I usually like to be there on set for the first shot even if I’m not in the scene. Now that’s not possible given the limit put on the number of people on set.”