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A shift in Malayali’s viewing habits
The Hindu
Web series, other online content gaining popularity
The jury for the State Television Awards which rejected all entries for television serial awards last week, and made scathing remarks on the abysmal quality of the content, had an important recommendation to make. It called for a widening of the scope of the awards to include web series and other online content, in what became an acknowledgement of an explosion of online content in Malayalam and a shift in viewing habits of the population over the past few years. What began as short amateurish videos online some years ago has now gradually given way to more professional content, drawing in millions of viewers. Karikku, which was launched in YouTube in 2018, with the short humorous series Thera Para, is ahead of the rest of the pack as far as Malayalam content creation is concerned. It has a YouTube subscriber base of 7.4 million, which is more than that commanded by the official pages of some of the top entertainment and news channels in Malayalam. Some of its most popular videos have managed to reach 30 million hits.![](/newspic/picid-1269750-20250217064624.jpg)
When fed into Latin, pusilla comes out denoting “very small”. The Baillon’s crake can be missed in the field, when it is at a distance, as the magnification of the human eye is woefully short of what it takes to pick up this tiny creature. The other factor is the Baillon’s crake’s predisposition to present less of itself: it moves about furtively and slides into the reeds at the slightest suspicion of being noticed. But if you are keen on observing the Baillon’s crake or the ruddy breasted crake in the field, in Chennai, this would be the best time to put in efforts towards that end. These birds live amidst reeds, the bulrushes, which are likely to lose their density now as they would shrivel and go brown, leaving wide gaps, thereby reducing the cover for these tiddly birds to stay inscrutable.