‘OTT platforms are constraining creativity’: Pankaj Tripathi reveals he has been stopped from improvising lines as they were not approved the legal team | Bollywood News

It has been nearly eight years since the OTT revolution changed India’s content landscape. Early disruptors like TVF’s Pitchers and Netflix’s global juggernaut Sacred Games led the charge, opening the floodgates for a new kind of storytelling. Like any revolution, it came with both advantages and drawbacks. On one hand, OTT platforms changed viewers’ consumption habits and created space for stories that would never have found room in conventional theatrical channels. On the other hand, they gradually began constraining many storytellers, often refusing to back projects that deserved attention, and stalling riskier creative choices. Pankaj Tripathi, who himself became a national sensation thanks to OTT, recently opened up about how streaming giants have, over time, started restricting creators.
In a conversation with Bollywood Hungama, Pankaj, now also a producer, spoke about his first major production, Perfect Family, a web series that is streaming on YouTube instead of any major OTT platform. Explaining why he chose YouTube, he said, “When you join a platform, your creativity becomes constrained. There is a lot of pressure and involvement.” Elaborating on this, he added, “They decide who the creative head will be, the writing has to be approved, then they say the production value doesn’t look right. But here (on YouTube), there is complete freedom.”
Pankaj Tripathi further revealed that as an actor known for his brilliant on-set improvisation, he has now stopped improvising because platforms always involve legal teams that fear controversy. “I remember I was shooting for a web series and I improvised a line. A creative head came running to me and said, ‘Don’t say this.’ When I asked why, he said we have to check with the legal team. And I was like, now the legal team will decide what we say? Let the audience decide a few things too. If they don’t like something, they will reject it on their own.”
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He didn’t stop there. Sharing another instance from a shoot, Pankaj recalled, “I had to recite a poem for a scene. They told me we needed copyright permission. I said, it’s just four lines, what copyright issue can there be? I insed, but they refused, and eventually the shoot stalled.” He then took matters into his own hands: “So I contacted the poet’s family. I spoke to his son, and he said there was no copyright issue at all. He only asked if I could click a photo of myself with the book, his father would be happy. So I went ahead and said those four lines.”
Pankaj Tripathi’s debut show as a producer will stream on YouTube under a structured pay model, similar to the approach Aamir Khan’s Sitaare Zameen Par adopted after its theatrical run earlier this year. The first two episodes of Perfect Family will be available for free on the YouTube channel JAR Series, while the remaining episodes can be unlocked with a one-time payment of Rs 59.