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Thanks to a massive and growing online audience, Pakistani television dramas have become impossible to overlook. Recent blockbusters like Zanjeerain, Dar-e-Nijaat, Nashtar and Aap Ki Izzat, to name a few, routinely rake in millions of views per episode on YouTube. Their success is quite evident on social media with trending reels and loyal fandoms — the sheer visibility of Pakistani drama has made global celebrities of our local artists.

These numbers suggest a golden age, but this success also raises a critical question: Pakistani dramas have a massive digital footprint — but is the industry ready for a subscription-based streaming model?

ARY Digital has used the recent success of Tamasha Season 5 to benefit its digital ambitions. The massive fan following of the show laid out a timely opportunity for the channel to push its proprietary platform, ARY Plus.

According to the channel’s own early statistics, this appears to have worked, with 10.8 million downloads and a 25-minute average watch time recorded even before the formal app launch.

This suggests an impressive uptake and willingness to engage with the platform. The channel has subsequently moved its premium drama content away from YouTube and onto ARY Plus for domestic viewers.

Currently the app is free to download and use. Viewers can pay to watch Tamasha’s uncut live feed for Rs100 locally and $1 outside Pakistan, offering an early test of viewers’ willingness to pay for extra content.

Salman Iqbal, the CEO of ARY, also recently spoke about a wider home for Urdu content and publicly invited rival networks to participate. His vision for a unified Urdu streaming platform deserves attention but metrics such as the number of downloads, viewing time, and social media buzz can only account for the transactional side of the picture.

What is OTT, anyway?

Over-the-top or OTT television is a digital platform where content is distributed via the internet instead of terrestrial, cable, or satellite networks. By that definition, one can say that Pakistani dramas on YouTube are already OTT. However, streaming is much more than digital distribution. It requires an optimised platform specifically engineered for on-demand viewing.

Most of the recent conversation around ARY Plus has addressed the business and transactional questions surrounding audience migration, advertising revenue, and the value of owning viewer data. Unfortunately, these conversations are missing the mark on the creative and technical aspect: are Pakistani dramas being made to the same standards expected of the shows competing in a global streaming catalogue or are broadcasters placing conventional television inside a new container?

Are Pakistani screenplays OTT ready?

The first test facing Pakistani content is the screenplay. So far, the industry has been successful in conflating storytellers, screenwriters, and dialogue writers into one role. A story determines what happens, whereas a screenplay dictates how it unfolds visually on screen.

Traditionally, Pakistani dramas have remained overly reliant on conversations to explain emotions and plot developments. Commercial success, reinforced by weekly broadcast schedules and ad breaks, has become a creative limitation in screenwriting. This also points to the shortcomings of channels in hiring professionals capable of translating brilliant stories into greater screenplays.

Viewing behaviour on a streaming platform is vastly different. Instead of waiting for weekly episodes, users can watch several episodes consecutively, and this is where the slow pacing and talkative approach may not work, as the content may appear repetitive across multiple episodes and the audience can abandon a series within minutes.

This does not mean every show must follow the breakneck pacing of a Netflix production — a slow burn can be extremely engaging when silence, behaviour, and atmosphere reveal something new. To thrive on streaming, Pakistani dramas will need to be treated as disciplined and controlled projects, conceived as limited series — where the depth of a story determines its length, rather than inherited television slots that force channels to stretch a 10-episode conflict across 30.

Is the visual execution OTT-ready?

Traditionally, Pakistani drama’s visual execution has felt flat and static. It has followed a familiar template: a static camera moves between wide shots, medium shots, and close-ups, with limited to no movement within a scene. Global streaming content stands out because the camera movements are purposeful. They reveal characters, direct attention, or change the emotional pressure of a scene rather than acting as a tool to record conversations from a fixed position.

Recently, Dar-e-Nijaat attempted to break that pattern. It experimented with dolly zooms — where the camera pulls back while zooming in to create a disorienting effect — and low-angle body-mounted shots. Together, these effects let the viewers in on the character’s psychological and emotional state. This is a welcome shift in cinematography, but these shots are very few and far between with the serial mainly falling back to static conversational scenes.

Similarly, colour grading — which includes adjusting the colour of a shot, its contrast and tone — needs to be used as a critical storytelling tool to maximise the intended impact. Both HUM TV’s Zanjeerain and Netflix’s Kohrra (2025) rely heavily on their locations, but each uses them differently.

While Zanjeerain’s cinematography lets us in on the scale and rugged beauty of the mountainous setting, its colour grading does not always transform the landscape into the drama’s emotional tension.

In contrast, Kohrra’s depiction of rural Punjab in India through muted earth tones, a washed-out grey-blue palette and persistent haze makes it feel cold, dense, and morally obscured, a visual ambition yet to be matched by Pakistani drama. The atmosphere it creates carries the same grief and conflict as the characters. This is the power of colour grading. It not only establishes where the story is taking place but also tells us how the world feels, elevating an environment from just scenery to a dramatic force.

Pakistani drama enjoys a reach far beyond Urdu-speaking audiences. It has a loyal fan following across the Gulf, Britain, Australia, and North America. Therefore, production and creative teams must explore ways of reaching non-Urdu-speaking audiences authentically.

That means using accurate subtitles and dubbing rather than translating Urdu dialogue word for word. These subtitle and dubbing assets must be planned during production — a popular on-air drama that skips this step will incur extra costs for redoing subtitles and dubbing later, and in many cases, this simply cannot be done at all.

Can ARY Plus retain viewers and achieve scale?

ARY’s decision to restrict access to its premium dramas on YouTube could backfire. On one hand, it is keeping the dramas free on YouTube internationally, which brings in global advertising revenue and pulls in new audiences outside Pakistan. On the other, domestic viewers will be directed to ARY Plus, giving ARY greater control over local advertising, distribution, and user data.

It will also divide viewers across two platforms. After all, it was YouTube that gave Pakistani dramas the massive following they enjoy today, which is exactly what ARY now risks cutting into.

The real test for ARY Plus is whether it can hold on to local advertising control without driving away the very viewers that YouTube built for Pakistani drama.

But even if ARY solves the distribution problem, it needs to give the viewers a good enough reason to return – and any future paid offering would need to earn its price.

What will make Pakistani drama truly OTT-ready?

The industry has it all — exceptional artists, recognisable story writers, emotionally directed storytelling, and an unmatched understanding of family dynamics, class aspirations, and social reputation. These stories resonate with millions across the globe because their emotions are universal, even when they are unmistakably Pakistani.

The channel leadership must build an ecosystem to further promote talent. They will need to stop relying on television libraries and start commissioning quality-controlled and professionally localised projects built for streaming to compete with global streaming platforms. They will also need to be forthcoming in credibly reporting viewer retention, not just download counts.

YouTube has over the years proven a genuine demand for Pakistani drama. You don’t need to understand Urdu or live in Pakistan to get hooked on a story about love, family, and sacrifice — billions of views prove that. But one mustn’t assume that “views are subscriptions” — they are both very different commitments.

Watching something for free costs nothing; paying for it means the content must be good enough that people choose it over everything else competing for the same rupee.

ARY is moving its dramas behind the walls of its own app for viewers in Pakistan. The real test is whether they’ll follow. Will the app give them a reason to keep coming back? Will they ever be ready to pay for the content? And will the industry finally start making shows worth paying for?