How Amazon Prime is self-censoring its Indian content

Streaming platform Amazon Prime Video is apparently censoring some of its Hindi content while Netflix isn’t. A recent report in Live Mint noted that the movie The Dirty Picture had scenes missing on Amazon Prime, including an erotic scene and explicit dialogue. The result is that the movie has a total running time with is 17 minutes shorter than its version on Netflix.

Live Mint also looked at “2015 sex comedy” Hunterrr, and pointed out that the Amazon Prime version was nine minutes shorter than its Netflix counterpart, with a sex scene, among others, being cut. The report said, “Amazon voluntarily editing content raises the question whether self-censorship influences the company’s decision on buying movie titles. So far, Amazon has stayed away from streaming movies that have been denied a public release by the Censor Board of India. However, three such banned movies, Unfreedom, Firaaq and Gandu, are available on Netflix.”

Amazon Prime’s India team had been pulled up last month by its US team for this kind of censorship, with the US team saying the Indian team could only censor and add disclaimers to Indian content. However Indian shows would air worldwide on the platform without censorship. The reprimand came after Amazon India had self-censored several scenes from the show The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. 

The question of self-censorship by streaming platforms has been discussed several times. In November, The Print quoted “two reliable government sources” as saying “Netflix and Hotstar agreed to adopt the ‘best practices internationally’ and come up with a set of guidelines to self-regulate the content they broadcast.” Netflix denied this.