Gadgets
Netflix India Announces 41 Titles for 2021: 13 Movies, 15 Series, and More
Karan Johar’s Dharmatic (the digital arm of Dharma Productions) is the most common fixture in Netflix’s new slate with five projects in total across the board. Other major production houses include Viacom18 Studios, Anil Ambani’s Reliance Entertainment, Screwvala’s RSVP, T-Series, Lionsgate, Ekta’s Balaji Telefilms, Anushka’s Clean Slate Films, Endemol Shine, Condé Nast India, Vice Media, India Today, and AwesomenessTV.
This is the biggest slate Netflix has announced in one go from India, and insiders say that more original content will be announced throughout 2021. For now, the 41 new titles are already more than what Netflix India has released in years past. In 2020, Netflix released 31 Indian titles, including 10 series, 16 movies, and five comedy specials. That was the product of a Rs. 3,000 crores (about $420 million) investment that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings had announced when he visited New Delhi in late 2019. Netflix didn’t provide a new number at the See What’s Next India event on Wednesday.
Here’s how the 41 Netflix Indian originals pan out: there are 13 movies, 15 scripted series, six stand-up comedy specials, four documentaries, and three reality TV shows. That’s a lot to parse through, which is why we’ve divided all of it in neat lists below that you can quickly parse through. If you want to learn more, be sure to check out our dedicated coverage from Netflix’s See What’s Next India event on Wednesday — attached below — for all the new Indian movies, series, documentaries, and reality series coming your way this year.
Netflix India 13 new movies
Netflix Unveils 13 Indian Movies for 2021, With 5 New Films Led by Sonakshi Sinha, Taapsee Pannu, Others
Ajeeb Daastaans — from Karan Johar, with director Neeraj Ghaywan
Bulbul Tarang — starring Sonakshi Sinha
Dhamaka — starring Kartik Aaryan
The Disciple — from Chaitanya Tamhane
Haseen Dillruba — starring Taapsee Pannu
Jaadugar — starring Jitendra Kumar
Jagame Thandhiram — starring Dhanush
Meenakshi Sundereshwar — starring Sanya Malhotra
Milestone — from Ivan Ayr
Navarasa — from Mani Ratnam
Pagglait — starring Sanya Malhotra
Penthouse — from Abbas–Mustan
Sardar Ka Grandson — starring Neena Gupta, Arjun Kapoor
Netflix India 15 new series
Netflix Unveils 15 Indian Series for 2021, With 5 New Led by Raveena Tandon, Madhavan, Others
Netflix Renews Kota Factory, Jamtara, Mismatched, Masaba Masaba, Little Things, She for New Seasons
Aranyak — starring Raveena Tandon
Bombay Begums — from Alankrita Shrivastava
Decoupled — starring Madhavan
Delhi Crime: Season 2 — an International Emmy winner
Feels Like Ishq — starring Radhika Madan, Tanya Maniktala, Zayn Marie Khan, Neeraj Madhav
Finding Anamika — starring Madhuri Dixit Nene
Jamtara: Season 2 — from National Award-winning director Soumendra Padhi
Kota Factory: Season 2 — from The Viral Fever
Little Things: Season 4 — starring Mithila Palkar
Mai — from Anushka Sharma
Masaba Masaba: Season 2 — starring Neena Gupta, Masaba Gupta
Mismatched: Season 2 — starring Prajakta Koli
Ray — from director Abhishek Chaubey
She: Season 2 — from Imtiaz Ali
Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein — starring Shweta Tripathi
Netflix India 6 comedy specials
Untitled Aakash Gupta stand-up special
Comedy Premium League
Untitled Kapil Sharma stand-up special
Untitled Prashasti Singh stand-up special
Untitled Rahul Dua stand-up special
Untitled Sumukhi Suresh stand-up special
Netflix India 4 new documentaries
Netflix Unveils 4 Indian Documentaries – From Karan Johar, Leena Yadav, Vice, and India Today
Crime Stories: India Detectives — set in Bengaluru
House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths — from Leena Yadav
Indian Predator — from Vice Media, India Today
Searching for Sheela — from Karan Johar
Netflix India 3 new reality TV shows
Netflix Renews Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives, The Big Day for Season 2
The Big Day: Collection 2 — from Condé Nast India
Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives: Season 2 — from Karan Johar
Social Currency — from Fazila Allana, Kamna Menezes
Gadgets
Microsoft Partners With Inworld to Bring AI Game Development Tools to Xbox
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
Gadgets
BSNL Offers Free 4G SIM Upgrade: Here’s How to Get It
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Gadgets
Realme GT 5 Pro Teased to Feature 3,000 Nits Display; More Details Revealed
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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