From “No” to Global Go: How a Rejected Short Film Becomes the Launchpad for India’s First AI Voice-Cloning OTT Platform
Software developer-turned-filmmaker Sahil Dhamija couldn’t secure an OTT slot for his debut short film, he identified some real gaps between entertainment and technology especially, a time-consuming dubbing. The setback catalysed Rochak, an AI-powered platform that now turns any film into fifteen-plus languages within hours and streams the actor’s own voice worldwide.
Sahil Dhamija’s first taste of filmmaking was intoxicating—until distribution realities crashed the party. Shot on a shoestring and titled Public Place, the short wrapped in May 2024 and was promptly rejected by every OTT service he approached. Feedback was polite yet fatal: production value “too niche,” dubbing budget “too high,” audience “too limited.” By Independence Day the film was on YouTube, garnering views but yielding little revenue.
Rather than quitting, Dhamija dissected the bottleneck. Dubbing, he discovered, soaks up to 20 percent of a mid-budget film’s cost and adds six weeks to release calendars. Worse, audiences often hate the substituted voices. The answer wasn’t bigger budgets; it was better technology.
Enter Rochak. Over the next twelve months Dhamija and co-founder Bijay Rawat trained neural networks to capture an actor’s vocal fingerprint—pitch arcs, breath gaps, emotional subtlety—and re-synthesise that performance in multiple languages. The result became Rochak Voice Engine, capable of cloning dialogue tracks for a full feature film in under six hours.
Validation came quickly. The platform’s inaugural release, MILF, debuted in Hindi, English, Arabic, and Tamil. Analytics lit up: 73 percent of viewers chose a dubbed track, average watch-time surged 33 percent, and subtitle use dwindled. Clearly, audiences crave linguistic comfort as long as emotional authenticity stays intact.
The roadmap is equally bold. An Android app drops this month-end with offline downloads, 4K casting, and swipe-based language switching. iOS follows next month; smart-TV apps for Android TV, Fire TV, and webOS are already in QA. Beyond that, Rochak is engineering a lip-sync module that visually aligns mouth movements to each dubbed language, plus a Creator Console where filmmakers can upload masters, select target tongues, and receive ready-to-stream files—all on subscription economics.
By 2027 the platform targets 35 languages, real-time dubbing for live events, and an “opening weekend, everywhere” reality for storytellers. Rochak’s journey from rejection to reinvention proves that sometimes the fastest route to success begins with a very public “no.”
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