MUMBAI: Ekta Kapoor dominates the TV, digital, and cinema space. She has always managed to take risks and her success story continues to be an inspiration for many others. Ekta was 17 when she started her office from a garage in her bungalow and since then, she has not looked back. Slowly but steadily she forayed from TV, into films and ALTBalaji today has become a success story for homegrown original content. Even as Ekta manages to strike a balance between the content that she produces, Alt received a fair amount of criticism for its sexual content as well. ALTBalaji today turns 3.

The producer spoke to a media portal and said, 'I was so scared because everyone told me you don't have catch-up content queen, koi Indian TV shows nahi hai, you don't have any international content, you don't have a brand name like Netflix or Amazon. You are an Indian app and anyway, people will think you will make saas-bahu shows.'

Ekta reminiscence and added, 'I made Gandi Baat and someone told me it is such a progressive show. I was trying to do just that... I was trying to get stories that were slightly edgy in small-town India. Of course, it was sexual, I had no problem with that but it was far more progressive than anything else I had done. There were stories about women who had discovered their sexuality.'

She further revealed the high she felt when she proved everyone wrong. 'As I said, everyone thought it won't work and when the app started working, people were shocked. An original content platform has never worked before, internationally or otherwise. Even for Netflix, it had to get international TV shows on its platform, even Amazon, it was an amazing collaboration of e-commerce and content. But Alt was an individual concept. Everyone said what are you doing? but, I wanted to do it because I felt like the girl from the garage who started her career then. Everyone else was a big daddy and I was a newcomer and I can't tell you how good I felt. I was tired of people expecting me to succeed or rather were expecting me to fail but I was back in the game.'

Credits: Pinkvilla