Filmmaker Shamoon Abbasi has added his two cents to the discourse surrounding the distinct lack of Pakistani content on streaming platforms such as Netflix.
In a video posted to his Instagram account on Wednesday, he said Pakistan’s entertainment industry had neither the widely-relatable narratives, nor the technical expertise to meet the standards of global streaming giants.
Abbasi started off by addressing a statement by Salman Iqbal, the CEO of ARY Digital , who said his channel was approached by Netflix for streaming rights. The executive said he had rejected the offers in favour of building a Pakistani streaming platform.
The filmmaker said he found the whole thing “impractical”, particularly if the idea was for ARY to have its own platform — the channel operates a free-of-charge streaming service called ARY Plus.
Abbasi said any attempt at a Pakistani streaming service needed support — and more importantly, content — from multiple different channels.
Then he addressed notions that “Netflix’s regional headquarters are in India and they made the decision not to platform Pakistani content”. The filmmaker acknowledged that such ideas were brought to the forefront by senior industry voices such as Mehreen Jabbar and Faysal Quraishi, but said they were only part of the story.
“Have we achieved the standards where we can give our content to Netflix?” the filmmaker asked.
Abbasi explained that he was doing a film in 2017 and wanted to work with Netflix; he had received some technical requirements from aggregators that would allow his work to meet Netflix’s standards.
He said many of the things were still missing in Pakistan’s industry. “You don’t know HDR workflows, you don’t know about colour science, you don’t know about sound mixing.”
The filmmaker said it was true that Pakistani content was popular, but from a technical point of view, it was not up to the mark.
“There’s a channel, I won’t take its name, Netflix has commissioned them to make a drama for the last four years — I think it will be four years soon — it has a big cast too. But if you’ll notice, there hasn’t been so much as a trailer for this drama and that’s because Netflix has spent the time bringing it up to their standards.”
Getting to the second problem, Abbasi said the plots of Pakistani dramas were stuck “in a box”. He said Pakistan’s entertainment industry almost exclusively made family dramas whereas Netflix had shows on “traditional issues, political conflicts and other big things”.
He said Pakistan’s content was popular with Pakistani audiences because they could relate to the narratives; this would be less applicable if the same shows were marketed to foreign audiences. “You need global stories,” the filmmaker said.
Abbasi lamented the lack of good literature output from the country, which created a shortage of stories to use for television. “One of our biggest issues is that we don’t have many famous, best-selling novels,” he said.
“See, Netflix buys stories, not actors. Our actors are great, our scriptwriters — at least for Pakistan — are great. But when international standards are involved… then you need your stories to be global and unfortunately we lack in that part because we don’t dare to think up bigger stories and present them to a worldwide audience.”
The filmmaker said a mindset had taken hold in the industry — pushed by channels — that a drama was only as good as the superstars cast in it and this led to stories losing priority.
Pakistani audiences, he said, would not be as keen to pay to watch content from their own country because they are already used to watching it for free on YouTube, which presented yet another problem for putting it on Netflix.
Abbasi said it was unfortunate that channel owners in Pakistan had not sought to work with platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO Max to train their crew and improve their content.
Especially for the ARY Digital CEO, he said, “Your statement [that you refused to work with Netflix] is a bit confusing. I am not proud of it, it’s actually sad. Maybe you should have said that we’ll work to reach international standards.”
Earlier, an announcement was made by the federal minister for planning and development, Ahsan Iqbal, that the government was in talks to get Pakistani content on Netflix while simultaneously working on an indigenous streaming platform. Abbasi said this was good news, but only if the industry raises its standards in the process.
On Monday, actor Usama Khan shared his views, which aligned with the filmmaker on Pakistan’s lack of good stories. He said the world didn’t revolve around family-centric content the way Pakistan’s media ecosystem did and that international streaming networks will want something more — “gripping true-crime, political thrillers and deep dives into the complexities of our institutional systems”.
