The end of Induna and physical film releases in India

The shuttering of Induna highlights the takeover of OTT streaming, and the gradual end to physical film releases themselves

Induna, a Kolkata-based e-commerce platform for buying DVDs and home media, announced early Friday morning that it would be shutting shop. The shuttering was announced in an email to the site’s customers, and on the firm’s social media pages. The site will not accept orders beyond March 20, it said. 

In the years since its launch in 2007, when e-commerce was starting to find its footing in India, Induna emerged as an aggregator of film DVDs— and later Blu-Ray disks— for film enthusiasts in India, offering shipping everywhere from small towns without extensive film libraries to countries where DVDs were not locally available. 

In spite of rampant piracy in the form of physical disks sold by unauthorized vendors, the site continued to operate, serving up everything from big-budget films to more independent films that would be hard to find elsewhere.

The company did not shy away from the reason for its shuttering: streaming on OTT platforms had put more films within reach of more people without having to buy physical disks, and film producers in India are increasingly skipping physical releases altogether. 

“With various other new means of consuming cinema, and the cessation of DVD releases by almost all production houses, it had already been unviable to run affair[s] at Induna for a while now, [and] we have now reached that point when we bid goodbye and say thank you to you all for being along with us in this most momentous ride,” the site told users in its farewell email.

In other words, the death of the physical media format for film releases spelled the end for Induna. The site even weathered a 2016 blocking in India, after the producers of the comedy Great Grand Masti reportedly objected to an automated listing on the site announcing that the film’s DVD was ‘coming soon’. (A copy of the film headed to the Central Board of Film Certification’s now-disbanded appellate tribunal was leaked, apparently leading its producers to obtain blocking orders for sites that may not have even hosted a copy of the leaked cut.)

The site’s inactivity long signaled the circumstances it faced. Its last promotional email boasting of new additions to the site’s catalogue was sent in 2018.