When James Cameron's epic sci-fi movie Avatar hit cinemas in late 2000s, plenty of Indians watched it and wondered why we weren't making films like that. According to Saurabh Pandey, Founder and CEO of Eloelo Group, that question is about to lose its force.
Eloelo is an Indian live social entertainment and social gaming platform headquartered in Bengaluru. It was launched in 2020 by former Flipkart executives Pandey and Akshay Dubey. The platform bridges video/audio livestreaming with interactive gaming tailored specifically for India's youth and vernacular markets.
At the 17th edition of TechSparks, YourStory's flagship event, Pandey showed off Dolphin AI, Eloelo's AI video creation tool, in a session titled 'Can AI turn India into a global content export hub?', moderated by Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project.
Dolphin AI currently has a waitlist, with the platform releasing invite codes in batches.
For now, Dolphin AI is free as Eloelo is giving away generous early credits so creators can make their first few videos and get a feel for the solution. However, a credit-based pricing model will arrive eventually. Pandey said the team mainly wants to see how people use Dolphin AI, and early signs are promising: roughly 15,000 videos were built in about eight days, mostly through organic discovery.
The end of the budget bottleneck
Pandey's pitch centres on who gets to tell big stories. In the VFX era, he said, movie making belonged to whoever had the money. A good storyteller with a period drama in mind simply could not afford the visuals it demanded, and that made budgets the real gatekeeper of content.
AI is a total game-changer, he argued. Production usually eats up 50 to 60% of revenue in this category, squeezing distribution budgets and destroying unit economics. By slashing those production costs, creator imagination finally gets the breathing room it needs to thrive.
Distribution, meanwhile, has become largely algorithmic. A creator in India now competes for attention in the US or Europe on the same footing as anyone else.
Why this time might be different
The conversation then moved to another area of content that is seeing traction: micro-drama and short-form content. These have attracted plenty of Indian startups, yet few have become popular.
In India, he said, the top four or five micro-drama players together are running at more than Rs 5,000 crore, a level they reached in just 18 months.
He also pointed to South Korea, a country of 52 million people that has built a $15-billion content export economy. India has 1.4 billion people and no shortage of creative talent, he said. What it has lacked is intent, technology, ambition and capital. Too many Indian creators, in his view, still focus only on local audience. Nobody asks whether a new LLM is launching for India, he noted; it just launches for the world. Why shouldn't Indian stories do the same?
Platforms will consolidate, but supply is wide open
Pandey doesn't expect micro-drama to escape the pattern seen elsewhere. Food delivery, quick commerce, ecommerce and ride-hailing all ended up with two or three heavily funded players holding 70 to 75% of the market, and he expects the same for content.
The real opportunity, he said, lies on the supply side.
Eloelo launched about 200 new micro-dramas last month, roughly five or six a night, and works with around 90 production houses. His advice to would-be founders is to skip the platform race and build lean AI studios instead: a handful of writers, editors, promo producers and a line producer who could feed micro-dramas, OTT content and exportable IP to the big platforms.
He also had a message for writers and producers wary of AI. Use it as a brainstorming partner, he said, and ship more. As an example, he floated an idea close to his heart. An AI Ramayana already exists, but nobody has yet made a spectacular AI Mahabharata.
Eloelo has grown from one platform to five within the same group, Pandey said, and an IPO is not on the cards anytime soon. The focus is on growing profitably and sustainably.