Streaming giants Netflix, Amazon, and Disney on Friday privately discussed a possible legal challenge and other ways to stall India's new tobacco warning rules, amid fears they will need to edit millions of hours of existing web content, sources said.
The pushback is the latest headache for streaming giants in
India, a top growth market. Companies often face legal cases and police
complaints their content sometimes hurts religious sentiment, and many have
self-censored content over the years. As part of India's anti-tobacco drive,
the health ministry this week ordered streaming platforms should within three
months insert static health warnings during smoking scenes.
Also, India wants at least 50 seconds of anti-tobacco
disclaimers, including an audio-visual, at the start and in the middle of each
program. In the first signs of industry distress, executives of the three
global streaming companies, and India's Viacom18 which runs billionaire Mukesh Ambani's
JioCinema app, held a closed-door meeting, where Netflix said the rules would
hit customer experience and push production houses to block their content in
India, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.
Executives in India also discussed ways of a possible legal
challenge to assert that other ministries - IT and information &
broadcasting - have powers over streaming giants, and not the health ministry,
said one of the sources. The companies, and India's health ministry, did not respond
to a Reuters request for comment. Reuters is the first to report the industry's
planned pushback.
Already, all smoking and alcohol-drinking scenes in movies
in India's cinemas and on TV, under the law, require health warnings, but so
far there were no regulations for the streaming giants, whose content has
become increasingly popular. In 2013, Woody Allen stopped his film, Blue
Jasmine, from being screened in India after learning about mandatory
anti-tobacco warnings would be inserted into its smoking scenes. Activists have
welcomed new anti-tobacco rules by India, the world's second-largest producer
of tobacco that kills 1.3 million people each year in the country. India also
has stringent cigarette pack warning rules.
HEALTH VS WARNINGS "HARASSMENT"
Truth Initiative, a public health nonprofit group, in March,
said 60 percent of the 15 most popular streaming shows among 15- to
24-year-olds it analyzed contained depictions of tobacco, "effectively
exposing 25 million young people to tobacco imagery" in 2021. But in
India, companies from Netflix to Amazon to Disney, also have popular Hindi
content which often shows Bollywood actors smoking, something activists say
encourages tobacco use.
India is a hot market for streaming giants, and executives
fear business impact and higher costs. Ambani's JioCinema has just in recent
weeks signed multiple content deals with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros, bringing
popular shows like 'Succession' and 'The Office' to its platform. Together, the
companies have millions of hours of content.
"New content being created needs to be changed and old
content needs to be modified. It could require insertion of ad-type warning in
between," said Kaushik Moitra, partner at Bharucha & Partners who
advises streaming firms and production houses. During the Friday meeting,
Amazon and other companies made the point there was no way films can be edited
in three months, said the second source, adding the industry decided to consult
lawyers and write letters in protest.
Dylan Mohan Gray, a filmmaker who directed documentaries
such as 'Fire in the Blood', said the new Indian rules amount to 'harassment',
saying that murder, war, and extremely violent crime scenes were not regulated
in the same way. "Smoking, which though certainly a serious public health
problem, is both legal and a massive source of government revenue in this
country," he said. © Reuters
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