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Commentary: Why Pakistan's OTT streaming dilemma needs a coexistence strategy
The country's challenge has never really been the quality of its stories
- PUBLISHED: Thu 16 Jul 2026, 2:31 PM UPDATED: Thu 16 Jul 2026, 2:33 PM
Sadiq Saleem is a Chartered Accountant and finance leader with over two decades of experience in global organisations. Equally passionate about storytelling, he writes on entertainment, lifestyle and popular culture for leading publications, bringing together analytical insight and a sharp editorial voice.
Two announcements landed within days of each other and together captured Pakistan's uneasy relationship with global streaming. Federal Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal revealed the government was in talks with Netflix and other platforms to secure fairer visibility for Pakistani content, while at the same time confirming plans to launch a homegrown OTT platform.
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Around the same time, ARY Digital CEO Salman Iqbal disclosed that Netflix had approached his network to license content, and that ARY had turned the offer down. His reasoning, delivered on social media, was that Pakistan should stop relying on others and instead build its own streaming service, backed by what he called the technology and creative skill already in the country.
Both men are arguing for the same long-term goal. Neither is wrong to want it. But having spent years inside the OTT industry, including as part of the MBC Studios team that launched Shahid, one of the Middle East's earliest successful subscription platforms, I think the confidence in this moment deserves closer scrutiny before it hardens into policy or precedent.
Shahid succeeded because it filled a real vacuum. When it launched, Arab audiences were already comfortable paying for premium television through satellite subscriptions, and there was no dominant regional streaming competitor asking for the same subscription dollar. Shahid wasn't asking viewers to change their behaviour. It was giving them a digital version of something they already valued and already paid for.
Pakistan's streaming landscape looks nothing like that. The country's challenge has never really been the quality of its stories. Pakistani dramas are genuinely strong, and its industry has produced work that travels well beyond its borders. The challenge is convincing viewers to pay for what they can already get for free. Kabhi Mein Kabhi Tum, Tere Bin, Ishq Murshid and Kaisi Teri Khudgarzi have crossed billion views each on YouTube, watched and rewatched at no cost. That habit is deeply entrenched, and it did not form by accident. It formed because YouTube has been free, familiar, and reliably available for over a decade, while paid alternatives have struggled to offer viewers a reason to switch.
Pakistan has tried building that alternative more than once. Zee5 arrived with genuine local content, including the acclaimed series Churails, and still could not build a durable subscriber base before facing regulatory hurdles. Goonj TV has repeatedly appeared and disappeared from app stores. Dekho launched and faded away. Urduflix tanked as well. Tapmad remains active but has effectively repositioned itself around live sports rather than drama or film, and its own user reviews are dominated by complaints about buffering and billing rather than praise for its catalogue. Even broadcasters with existing audiences and established brand trust, including ARY, Hum, and See Prime, have tried to migrate viewers from YouTube onto their own apps. Despite owning some of the country's biggest dramas and most loyal fan bases, none of them has fundamentally shifted how Pakistanis actually watch such content.
ARY Digital's YouTube channel has crossed 68 million subscribers and 75 billion views, yet its own app, free to watch just like YouTube, has managed just 6.4 million downloads since launch, with only about 26,000 in the past month. Hum TV shows a similar pattern, over 51 million YouTube subscribers against roughly 4 million app installs, with monthly downloads down to a few thousand. Both apps also carry weak ratings, closer to two and three stars, with users citing missing episodes and playback issues rather than a lack of interest in the content itself.
The subscription numbers make the scale of that challenge clearer. Pakistan has an estimated 300,000 Netflix subscribers against Netflix's global base of roughly 232.5 million, a rounding error by any measure. Only about 30 percent of the country has broadband access according to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. Building a successful paid platform requires solving that access and behaviour problem first, and no amount of confidence in local creative talent changes that math on its own.
There is also a content library question worth asking honestly. A homegrown platform stocked primarily with Pakistani dramas, films, reality shows, stage productions, and Coke Studio, supplemented with licensed Turkish and international content, would be entering the market without two of the most watched entertainment industries in the region, a gap that matters given how much of the audience's viewing habit has been shaped by cross-border content over the years. Competing for subscription dollars without that library is starting several steps behind.
None of this is an argument against Pakistan building its own platform. It absolutely should, and the government's push under the Uraan Pakistan export strategy is a reasonable and overdue ambition. The minister is also right that Pakistani content has not received the space it deserves on major global platforms, and that regional market dynamics, including how streaming giants prioritise their catalogues around whichever market dominates a given region, have played a role in that imbalance. That is a legitimate grievance and one worth pursuing through negotiation, exactly as the government is now attempting with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
But visibility and infrastructure are not competing goals and framing them as a binary choice risks costing Pakistan more than it gains. Licensing selected content to Netflix would not undermine a future homegrown platform. If anything, it could introduce Pakistani dramas to millions of viewers who would otherwise never actively search for them, building international demand and audience awareness while the local platform has the time it genuinely needs to mature, raise investment, and solve the harder problem of shifting consumer behaviour.
The real question is not whether Pakistan should build its own OTT platform. It should. The real question is whether declining the world's largest streaming platform today accelerates that vision or simply delays Pakistani stories, actors, and directors from reaching the global stage they are already more than ready for.
Both strategies can coexist. A homegrown platform gives Pakistan control over data, advertising, and the long term customer relationship. A presence on Netflix gives it immediate, borderless visibility that no local platform can replicate for years, no matter how well funded or well intentioned. Choosing one at the expense of the other is not protecting the industry. It is simply choosing to wait, while the audience Pakistan is trying to reach continues watching for free, on a platform that already has their attention.
Saleem can be contacted on his Instagram handle @sadiqidas.