An Award for Quality or Popularity? Is voting the right criteria as chosen by the recently introduced Flyx Filmfare OTT Awards

Flyx Filmfare OTT Awards: Voting might choose the most popular but not the content-rich

OTT, for the last few years, has come up as a great source and space for rich and independent content to flourish. It has provided a space where creators with alternate, independent, and experimental ideas can have a say and showcase their work. And amid the COVID outbreak, it served as one of the major sources of entertainment and infotainment for most of the people out there. And certainly looking at that, we finally have something to recognize their efforts with the introduction of Flyx Filmfare OTT awards.

The 2020 edition of Flyx Filmfare OTT Awards curate the shows that have been released between Aug 01, 2019, and July 31, 2020, are being considered for the awards for this year. There are around 20 categories for which the awards will be given. And how will the awards be given? So, the criteria for the selection of awardees include you, the audience to vote for it, which from the above, looks decent and democratic way to choose but is not really so.

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To frame the argument on why the criteria for voting is not the right choice here, we would like to draw for you, how you get to know about a particular content that you end up watching. Different programs/ content on different OTT platforms are made with different certain budgets. Some have a good amount of budget dedicated to making and marketing of Content while others, that have a tight budget, cut on money that should be spent on marketing. So, there are very high chances that there must have been existing some content on OTT Platforms which is exceptional in content quality but not popular among masses because it didn’t have much budget to spend on the marketing? So, from the pool of content that is present on OTT, masses will vote for only the ones that became popular, and the ones that are popular are the ones who have spent good money on marketing. So, how justified are the criteria of voting? And what are we voting for, the content or the best marketing strategy which made it a popular content?

Consider this example, a film like Jallikattu, which is this year’s Oscar entry from India is a Telugu drama film that not a lot of people were aware of before it actually became the Oscar Entry. It is not a popular film, and especially not a film, the northern belt was well aware of, and was just not popular. But it is the entry because of its content quality now.

Among the nominations, there are several OTT films which have got space in the list of nominations in Flex Filmfare OTT Awards, but just to cite an example, ‘HIT’ which was Netflix released film didn’t get mentions in the nomination, not because of the poor content but because of less popularity.

So, here is the crucks of the discussion, we wholeheartedly appreciate the inauguration of the Flex Filmfare OTT 2020 awards and it will certainly encourage the content of new independent creators, but at the same time, it will fail to bridge the gap that it ideates to bridge. As in the end, what will happen is that the most popular, that certainly did spend the most money in marketing will win the race as the race is not of the popularity and not the quality.

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