On a Friday night last year, my family decided to rewatch the Bollywood comedy thriller Andhadhun starring Ayushmann Khurrana. Twenty minutes later, we were still searching for it. Netflix did not have it, nor did Prime, while Hulu had never heard of it.
Meanwhile, my cousin in Mumbai could have started it with a single tap, using the same Amazon Prime subscription we were paying for in the United States.
That night, I went down a rabbit hole—and the rabbit hole eventually turned into a dataset. My team at OTTASIA,  a free streaming guide for Asian movies, TV, and anime, analyzed the 200 most popular Hindi films released between 2010 and mid-2025, tracking where each film can legally stream today across five markets: India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The results explain a frustration that nearly every Indian-American household knows, but few have been able to quantify.
In India, 184 of those 200 films are included with a streaming subscription service, but in the United States, 51 of those films (more than one in four) are not included with any subscription service at all. Not Netflix, not Prime, not Hulu, or any of the smaller services. In other countries we analyzed, the percentage of Bollywood films Indians are missing from subscription services was 38% in Canada, 30% in the United Kingdom, and 21% in Australia.
This is not mostly a story about obscure films or missing services. People reading this may be familiar with the films Andhadhun, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Singham, and Rowdy Rathore, which are currently available on Amazon Prime Video in India, but not its US equivalent, nor on any other US subscription service.
Same company, same subscription price, different country, different library.
Your relatives in India are not paying for something you refused to buy. You are both paying for the same service and receiving different movies.
Why does this happen? Because streaming rights are sold country by country, and the diaspora falls between the cracks. When a Hindi film is licensed, the India rights command real money and are negotiated carefully. The North American rights are an afterthought, sometimes sold to a distributor who never places the film anywhere, sometimes bundled into deals that expire quietly. Nobody is deliberately locking out the diaspora. It is worse than that: nobody is thinking about the diaspora at all.
The consequences are greater than inconvenience. Fourteen percent of the 200 films in our study, roughly one in seven, cannot be legally watched in the United States at any price. Not on subscription, not for rent, not for purchase.Â
For a community trying to introduce its films to American-born children, that is a cultural supply chain with holes in it. And when a film is unavailable at any price, families do not simply give up. They find a pirated stream, complete with incorrect subtitles and a virus warning. The legal gap does piracy’s marketing for it.
There is one more twist. Even in India, no single service comes close to covering Bollywood. Netflix carries about half of the 184 streamable films. With Prime Video and get about three-quarters. It takes eight different services to cover them all. So, the fragmentation that frustrates the diaspora is a harsher version of a fragmentation Indians live with too. The difference is that in India every film has found a home somewhere. Many never find a home at all abroad.
What can a viewer do?
Three practical things. First, check the rental stores before assuming a film is no longer available: 38 of the 200 films in our study are available in the United States for rental or purchase on platforms like Apple TV and Amazon Video, usually for a few dollars. Second, look at official YouTube channels. Studios and broadcasters increasingly publish older films free with ads, legally, and these are often exactly the 2000s and 2010s titles that subscription services skip. Third, check if a film is available for your specific country. Availability guides designed for American audiences routinely give incorrect answers for Indian content, which is why I built OTTASIA, a free country-aware guide to where films and shows stream across Asia and the diaspora.Â
The larger fix, though, is not in viewers’ hands. It is in the industries. The Indian American community is one of the highest-income, highest-streaming-spend audiences in the country, and the films it wants to watch already exist, already subtitled, already digitized. The powers that be must decide that the diaspora is a market rather than a rounding error.
Until then, we will keep paying for subscriptions that quietly serve us less than they serve our cousins, and the films we grew up on will remain in a vault nobody remembers to open.
