Consider the credits on Trial by Fire, a Netflix drama about the 1997 Uphaar cinema fire in Delhi that killed 59 people. The story is set in India. The dialogue is in Hindi. The American screenwriter had never set foot in India. The editor was German. You might think that this was a recipe for disaster. On the contrary, it was one of Netflix India’s strongest drama, getting rave reviews across Indian and international media.
Television’s centre of gravity has shifted.
To Sidharth Jain, Founder at House of Talkies and The Story Ink, who has spent two decades moving between publishing, television and streaming, that credit roll captures the future of entertainment. The question is no longer where a story comes from, but about the people who can move it across cultures. As global streamers search the world for their next hit, the companies with the greatest influence may not be the ones making films, but the ones discovering stories early and translating them for international audiences.
Netflix commissions Korean thrillers, Spanish crime dramas and Japanese anime with the same enthusiasm that Hollywood studios once reserved for American sitcoms. Amazon develops Indian police procedurals alongside British literary adaptations. Apple finances French historical dramas, Mexican crime series and German science fiction. The world’s largest entertainment companies have quietly become multinational publishers, sourcing stories wherever compelling narratives—and future profits—can be found. English-language originals are no longer the default.
The economics explain why. Subscriber growth in North America and Western Europe has slowed, while the next hundreds of millions of viewers are expected to come from Asia, Africa and Latin America. India offers both scale and value: a well-regarded novel, film or format can often be acquired for far less than comparable American intellectual property, while the domestic audience is enormous and increasingly connected. Netflix and Amazon have both expanded aggressively in Indian production, and non-English programming now accounts for more than a third of all viewing on Netflix. What was once labelled “international” content has quietly become mainstream.
Yet global distribution is not the same as global storytelling.
“Netflix is like the world’s largest hard drive of films,” Jain says. “Just because it’s on the hard drive doesn’t mean it’s global.” His recommendation feed remains overwhelmingly Indian; a British subscriber’s looks entirely different. Algorithms have not erased cultural borders. They have simply digitized them.
The productions that genuinely cross over, he argues, usually have something else in common: creators who understand both the source culture and the audience they hope to reach. Monsoon Wedding succeeded because, in his view, Mira Nair could tell a deeply Indian story in a cinematic language international audiences instinctively understood. Slumdog Millionaire travelled because a British director interpreted India through a Western narrative grammar—controversially, perhaps, but effectively. Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice performed a similar feat for the British South Asian experience.
His point is that India’s bottleneck is not source material. It is translation—not linguistic translation, but cultural translation. The industry needs more people fluent in both Mumbai and Los Angeles, Chennai and London, capable of recognising which local stories possess universal emotional architecture and how to adapt them without sanding away what makes them distinctive.
That observation has implications far beyond filmmaking.
For decades, New York or London’s literary agencies occupied one of the entertainment industry’s most influential positions. They did far more than negotiate book contracts. They identified promising stories, packaged projects, hired the requisite talent and connected authors with studios long before cameras rolled. They became gatekeepers of the global adaptation business.
India has historically lacked comparable institutions. Publishing, cinema and television largely evolved in parallel. Rights management remained fragmented, literary representation was relatively small, and production companies often became involved only after a book or story had already proved commercially successful.
Streaming platforms are helping to collapse those boundaries.
As platforms compete for original intellectual property, the greatest competitive advantage increasingly lies in discovering stories before anyone else does: scouting unpublished novels from around the world, commissioning original ideas, acquiring life rights, building relationships with regional-language writers and identifying concepts with international potential.
Streaming has also overturned another long-held assumption: that international stories must be made in English to achieve worldwide success. Audiences have become comfortable with subtitles, multilingual casts and culturally specific settings. Increasingly, it is the local details that travel.
For India, whose storytelling traditions span dozens of languages, this creates an extraordinary opportunity. The next global franchise could emerge from a Malayalam thriller, a Tamil science-fiction novel or a Bengali detective series just as easily as from Hollywood. The caveat? We need the right team to tell the stories.
The challenge is no longer producing stories. India has never lacked those. It is discovering, developing and owning them before the rest of the world arrives.
For decades, ambitious writers believed success meant reaching Hollywood. Increasingly, Hollywood is the one looking elsewhere. The next Harry Potter, Squid Game or Money Heist may well be born in India.
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