“As far as Governance or any form of control is concerned, there needs to be homogeneity across mediums & platforms… Across movies with CBFC, Television & Radio with IBF… OTT – if it too comes under a scanner, in an ideal case there should be one body managing all medium across Linear and Digital. In my opinion self-regulation obviously is what really is ideal, but then when you scale up, you see a lot of non-serious players which could be detrimental to content or what needs to be communicated, so maybe some form of regulation will work here. But then again, having multiple stake holders, each having a vote on what really works & what doesn’t would complicate it, which happens in a lot of public sector initiatives. This could be a detrimental to the exponential growth that OTT is witnessing now. Having said that, it is important to have all forms of entertainment under the same regulation if at all.
I think the age group classification for content is the need of the hour as currently all ages have unrestricted access to all kinds of content, which often is not suitable for all or is not meant for consumption along with the whole family. The platform itself should have a mechanism to validate the age of the consumer while logging in or creating an account.”