It was some time around 2010 and the Internet had started invading people’s lives in a big way. YouTube stars were making waves in the West, and original content going Web-first was a thing. Around the same time, India was grappling with the idea of producing locally-sourced, original online material for content-starved millennials who were, at the time, consuming web series such as Pemberley Digital’s adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries .
Enter The Viral Fever (TVF), an online-only company that produced India’s first ever viral video, Rowdies, which hit the Internet in February 2012. Arunabh Kumar, CEO, TVF and his team started off small, doing branded content in 2010-11 for brands such as Colgate Plax. Before that, Arunabh, a graduate of IIT-Kharagpur, was an Assistant Director in Shah Rukh Khan’s film Om Shanti Om . “Working on a production like that was better than going to any film school,” he says, speaking to BLonCampus .
‘No one watches TV anymore’
“Right off the bat, I wanted to create original content for the Indian youth. Young people in the 2000s and early 2010 were completely cut off from television. There was nothing on TV that was aimed at that demographic. I approached several television networks with the idea, but none of them thought these stories would have an audience. So we put them online.” He adds: “Innovation in Indian TV programming has died a natural death. No one watches TV any more. Everyone gets everything they want on their mobile phones or tablets or, at best, their laptops. The television is a dead medium, especially if you’re targeting the youth. This is probably why streaming our episodes online worked out so well for us.”
As they were the first to venture into the web series format in India, TVF was constantly competing with itself to get better, Arunabh says. That is the reason for Pitchers , TVF’s their most popular web series to date, making it to IMDb’s List of Top 250 TV Shows . The only other series to make it to that list was Permanent Roommates , yet another TVF production.
Since first being uploaded in June 2015, the pilot of the series has had 2,611,188 views on YouTube alone. These numbers are discounting the episode views on TVF’s own website. The web series aired the last episode of its first season in August 2015. Arunabh says the team is working on finishing Permanent Roommates before moving on to Season 2 of TVF’s Pitchers .