Are you a fan of Sacred Games on Netflix? Or perhaps, Mirzapur on Amazon Prime Video? One of the primary factors that draws in viewers solely isn’t the storyline and actors, but it’s dialogue delivery as well. A true to life dialogue delivery, which sometimes involves profanity and is largely uncensored. However, it might not remain uncensored for long.
As per a recent survey conducted by YouGov, Indians want the government to regulate OTT platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video, Hotstar, Voot, and others. Nine out of ten people said that content – be it on TV, films or online should be censored by the government.
Over 59% of those who took the survey think that OTT platforms have a lot of offensive content that’s unsuitable for public viewing. Close to 47% are not comfortable watching shows and movies online around family whereas 30% feel that censorship will lead to deterioration of content quality.
Over 50% of them said that censorship should apply sometimes whereas 40% voted for always. This means a lot of people want the content on streaming platforms to be family-friendly. “Men are more likely than women to say they want the content to be regulated always (45% vs 34%) while women are more likely to want censorship sometimes (56% vs 46%),” the survey has revealed.
The survey may potentially speed up the process of content on OTT platforms like Netflix, Hotstar, and Amazon Prime Video being censored by the government. However, YouGov’s survey infers the aforementioned results from an inadequate dataset of 1005 respondents. Yes, just 1005 netizens in a country with 451 million Internet users. One cannot draw the conclusions that YouGov does with such a small subset of users.
Currently, video streaming giants are serving content without any regulation and this has become a major topic of debate online. Numerous court cases and complaints have been filed with the police in recent months, alleging that some shows being served online were obscene or hurt religious sentiment.
Users have slammed Netflix’s Sacred Games and Leila for hurting Hindu sentiments. This has even led to the cancellation of the second season of Leila. The government has been mulling the possible censorship of online streaming platforms and it seems like the whole process could be sped up.
