Veteran actor Asif Raza Mir has years of experience in the entertainment industry which makes his opinion regarding the growth and future extremely valuable. In a recent interview, he explains why Pakistan isn’t producing Netflix Originals for the streaming giant.
“How do you think India — which is now providing content for Amazon and Netflix — moved from film to these platforms [whereas we] have not run any original content on these platforms?” the actor asked in an interview with the digital media platform VCAST.
View this post on Instagram
“It’s not because of the content, it is because of the quality of the content,” he explained.
Speaking from personal experience in the industry, Asif Raza Mir has concluded that Pakistani content lacks quality.
“The period that I was in Geo for the first time, we started exporting our content to places like Barbados, Poland and Australia,” he shared. “Our content started going global, even to India for that matter. People loved our content but there was an issue — quality.”
He went on to add that as much as we would like to believe that our content is great, it is not when compared globally.
“When we don’t see competitors and don’t [create] comparisons, we’ll think our content is great but it is not. It is not great technically. It is beautiful as far as the concept is concerned, great performances, great direction but technically worthless. Our audio is useless. Our visuals are crap. Our editing is not worth talking about,” explained the veteran actor.
Knowing that his opinion will not be received well, he continued to share his knowledge hoping to make a positive contribution.
“I know people will not like what I am saying but that is a true fact. I know [because] when I used to send content, they used to say there are crackles in the audio, issues in the audio and it is of no use. How can we use this audio? In today’s world, platforms [such as Netflix] have the highest standards of quality.”
The actor and entrepreneur talked about the early days of his career at PTV, his venture into post-production, the technical issues with Pakistani content, investing into the ecosystem, and the importance of owning your country.
Channels and production houses don’t invest in talent to help make content technically greater than it is, he stated. “Not a single channel owner or production house has invested back into the talent, on the technicians. They’ve all made money. They all complain. They all talk about facilities. They all talk about how great Indian content is, how great Western content is. Can someone tell me how much they’ve invested back into the industry?”
