I have sat on both sides of the commissioning decision.

At aha, I built the content function from scratch: the team, the four sourcing pillars and their standard operating procedures, the greenlight process, and the analytics pipeline that fed it. The platform crossed a million paid subscribers within a year of launch, and we commissioned 13 fiction originals in a single year with one team. That growth is now taught as an ISB / Harvard Business Publishing case study, "aha Entertainment: Disrupting the Disruptor."

Since 2022 I have developed and delivered originals to national platforms, most recently Arabia Kadali, released on Amazon Prime Video in five languages.

Before content, I spent twelve years in software, data and product leadership, ending as Director of Product Engineering building an NLP-driven business intelligence product. That is the unusual part of my profile: I can run a writers' room and I can specify the data infrastructure that tells you which room to open. Most content executives can do one. Most data people can do neither.

For the past year I have been doing empirical work on how audiences for film, television and streaming behave: demand patterns, completion behaviour, retention, unit economics. It started in Telugu vertical micro-drama, where I worked with title-level data that nobody publishes, and it is widening to every language and market where data exists. I write about what I find: data does not tell you what to make; it tells you how to make it and how to be less wrong.

What this site is

This is where I publish first. Everything else, Medium, X and LinkedIn, carries copies that link back here.

Essays are the long pieces. Findings are short: one finding a week, where it came from, and what it cannot tell you. Positions is a list of the calls I have made in public, with the date, so anyone can check later whether I was right. Work is my record: the content function I built at aha, and the shows I greenlit and delivered.

There is another Karthik Tadepalli online, an economist. He is not me.

Contact

The fastest route is a message on LinkedIn or X. I read everything from platform executives, production houses, trade press and investors, and I answer with numbers where I have them.