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 hurt 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 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 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.
