Rohit Mittal's Autohead (2016) is a scuzzy Indian mockumentary of considerable repute. As is often with such films, a small number of people have actually seen it. It played at various international festivals and showed, in 2016, at MAMI. From 2017 to 2022, the film was on Netflix. In 2024, writer-director Mittal put it on YouTube, then took it off after a year. If you want to watch Autohead today, along with other indie oddities like Kabir Mehta's playful Buddha.mov and Anamika Haksar's sublime Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon, where would you turn?
Independent films enjoy a peripatetic life, pitching camp wherever they can find some shade and soil. MUBI, the world's leading arthouse streamer, was once big on its India programming, but appears to have burned through that initial fire. Platforms like Netflix and Prime Video treat indie as Corporate Social Responsibility, with a muted release or two every quarter. YouTube, though accessible, is not profitable to all. Film critics and festival programmers get access to private screeners, but that's a pitifully small and non-paying crowd. A filmmaker wants their film seen and the costs recovered. Whisper it, but some may even fancy a little profit. Is that so bad?
Enter Brew TV. Founded by filmmaker Ankur Singla, the fledgling streaming platform offers a homegrown sanctuary to independent films and shorts, focusing on but not limited to Indian titles. If that sounds like social work, Singla — a former tech entrepreneur (and a Punjabi by birth) — has worked out a nifty revenue-sharing model he hopes will prove sustainable. The platform combines a TVOD (Transactional Video on Demand) and SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) distribution model. In layman's terms, if you rent out your film on Brew TV, you get to keep 80 per cent of the earnings post taxes. The platform keeps 20 per cent. For subscriptions, the split is 50-50. The payouts are monthly and contracted. Moreover, if a filmmaker forwards a coupon to fans (thus bringing more viewers to the site), the revenue share is raised to 97 per cent. The platform boasts a friendly user interface, yearly and quarterly subscription plans (₹999 and ₹649 respectively), and, to sweeten the deal, no ads.
Down and Dirty Pictures
Singla says he stumbled into the idea out of necessity. His debut feature, the charming Chandigarh-set coming-of-age film Ghich Pich, took three years to complete. It secured a modest theatrical release — around 90 screens — in 2025. Despite encouraging reviews, the film was squeezed out of theatres in a week. Had Singla immediately gone to streaming from there, he could have sustained the initial momentum. But theatrical distribution in India mandates an eight-week exclusivity window before an OTT release. By the time Ghich Pich could be sold to a streamer, Singla notes, it was out of people's minds (It dropped on rental on Apple TV).
"It is brutally, counterintuitively difficult for indie films to be distributed in India," Singla tells THR India. What he and many others point to is a catch-22: most streaming platforms today demand a theatrical release to acquire a film, and theatres, no matter the size or scale of a movie, mandate the eight-week lock-in. The concept of a simultaneous release, which became popular for American films during the pandemic, hasn't found favour in India. "I realised there was no space where you can release a film like Ghich Pich and feel good about it."
There is precedent for what he thought to do next. In 2024, Karan Gaur's Fairy Folk, a modest, experimental relationship film with Rasika Dugal and Mukul Chaddha, skipped a traditional release rollout for a pay-if-you-like model on its own website. Brew TV is a much larger stab in a similar direction. Though he'd moved on mentally from his former life, Singla's tech background — he was co-founder of the super app Tapzo, acquired by Amazon INC in 2018 — came in handy. One of his key hires to build out Brew TV was Abhay Jain, who was technical lead at Paytm for eight years.
"From a consumer perspective, we knew we had to hit the international UI/UX benchmarks," says Singla. "The viewer does not care if it's a small website run by filmmakers. It expects the same experience."
Launched in July, Brew TV currently has a library of 270 titles, including over 30 shorts and a handful of shows. Several of these are 'catalogue' or 'gateway' titles meant to attract a wider audience. A search for Abhay Deol, for example, throws up three films from the mid-2000s, including Navdeep Singh's sandy masterpiece Manorama Six Feet Under. The choice is smart: as any film lover who came of age in that era will confirm, you can never turn back once you've seen Manorama. "The viewer can come for one of these films and end up discovering something genuinely obscure."
In my experience with Brew TV, both on app and website, I found the interface clean and intuitive. There are the usual themed categories ('crowd favourites', 'award winners', 'strange picks' and so forth) and even a Netflix-like randomiser for indecisive viewers. It's a generally witty place for cinephiles to browse through: Omkara, for instance, carries the clever hook line 'throne of blood', a nod to the Kurosawa masterpiece also adapted from Shakespeare.
Community Building For Indie
Brew TV arrives at a significant time for independent cinema in India. In late 2025, Kanu Behl's Agra, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago, finally released in Indian theatres. Soon after, Behl, in a social media post, called out multiplex chains for allegedly denying shows to the film. Behl's frustrating experience catalysed the formation of the Independent Filmmakers Association of India (IFAI), a collective of over 120 filmmakers advocating for improved distribution for indie and arthouse films.
On a call from Paris, Behl tells me he met Singla at one of the meetings for IFAI. Since Agra is streaming on Prime Video under a non-exclusive deal, they could also bring it to Brew TV. It feels like the best home for the film: a double-bill of Agra and Parth Saurabh's delicate Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar tells you so much about strained masculinity in contemporary small-town India. You can top it off with Behl's acidic 2019 short, Binnu Ka Sapna, also available on the platform, and call it a day.
"The space for independent cinema is shrinking globally," Behl says. "All the popular streamers today are driven by algorithms, which is a snake that is eating its own tail. If you only put a certain kind of film on the platform, those are the numbers and the data feedback you are going to get. The whole ecosystem is skewed against us."
Rohit Mittal, director of Autohead, says a platform like Brew TV was long overdue. "More than revenue generation, what's important for us is to have a solid, stable platform with a strong audience base. Money will trickle in once there is a viewership, and that is what I feel Brew TV is trying to build."
The Future at Brew
When I asked around in my circles, not many had heard of Brew TV. The platform launched quietly by design, says Singla, with no press or marketing blitz. The plan, he insists, is to keep your head down, smooth out the technical edges, build a worthy library, and scale originally. In the three-and-a-half months since launch, the platform has garnered 73,000 registered users. It averages around 2,000 daily active users. The numbers are modest compared to a mainstream streaming platform but encouraging enough for Singla and team to keep going. "We are a 20-member team running things at a fraction of the market costs. But we hope to grow."
To that end, there are some fundamentals he refuses to compromise on. The platform will always remain ad-free, he promises, and the films it showcases will always be curated. Currently, the curation team is made up of three filmmakers including Singla. The area of operation is too critical to be deputised entirely, he emphasises. "I am very particular that, when we call a film a 'hidden gem', it has to fit both those adjectives. It cannot be just hidden or just a gem."
As with any app in its teething phase, not every idea sticks. The developers were inspired by online patronage websites like Buy Me A Coffee? to allow viewers to donate to a filmmaker of their choice, directly through the platform. "The phrase 'buy me a coffee' is quite popular in the West, but yahan sabko samajh nahi aaya (not everybody got it here)." So they reverted to calling it something generic like 'support the filmmaker'.
Another experiment is a course-wise 'tasting menu' for films. You start by watching three curated films — a classic, a modern classic, and a short —and others unlock week-on-week (In my case, I got The Seven Year Itch, Ankhon Dekhi, and Binnu Ka Sapna for the first level). The gamification is aimed at new cinephiles finding their bearing, or those stricken by choice paralysis. Most charming, though, is a WhatsApp support line that goes directly to Singla's phone. He was expecting a flurry of complaints, but instead has been getting appreciative messages and reviews.
A goal on the horizon is to do 'Brew Premieres', where a new film debuts on the platform alongside limited screenings in select cities. There's been incipient interest from filmmakers outside of India. Singla also affirms ambitions to produce originals.
“In three months, we will launch something as a Brew Original," he says. It's got a nice ring to it.