IAMAI seeks sandbox trial for MIB accessibility rules, warns of blow to regional OTTs

New Delhi: The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has urged the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) to adopt a regulatory sandbox approach before enforcing its draft accessibility guidelines for OTT platforms, warning that the current framework could severely hurt regional and smaller services.

In its submission on the “Draft Guidelines for Accessibility of Content on Platforms of Publishers of Online Curated Content (OCCPs) for Persons with Hearing and Visual Impairment,” IAMAI has suggested that MIB, along with Prasar Bharati, pilot accessibility standards on a limited scale first.

The association said the findings should be published as a status report, giving platforms, especially smaller and regional ones, a clearer picture of the operational, technical and financial implications before any wider rollout.

IAMAI said that while it supports the government’s objective of making digital entertainment more inclusive for persons with disabilities, the draft guidelines in their present form could make many regional and niche OTT platforms commercially unsustainable. For several players, it said, the cost of compliance would in many cases surpass the revenues they generate.

The industry body called the draft “prescriptive and retrospective”, pointing out that retrofitting thousands of hours of existing catalogues with accessibility features and continuously re-verifying content would push costs to prohibitive levels.

It added that platforms would also need to revisit old licensing agreements to check rights for creating subtitles, audio descriptions, or sign language overlays, which could discourage them from hosting older library content altogether.

Given the limited viewership of archival content, IAMAI argued that mandating accessibility for entire back catalogues is unlikely to yield proportionate benefits. It recommended that requirements for existing libraries should not be compulsory and should instead be implemented by OCCPs on a best-effort basis.

The association also flagged several technical prescriptions in the draft, such as specific rules on caption font size, colour and placement, as excessively rigid and beyond what is contemplated even under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act.

IAMAI further noted that a large share of OTT libraries consists of licensed regional, foreign and syndicated content for which platforms often do not hold the underlying rights to alter or add accessibility assets. Imposing blanket obligations on platforms in such situations, it said, would create legal and contractual conflicts and may not be operationally workable.

The submission pointed out that leading international frameworks, such as the EU Accessibility Act 2025 and the UK Media Act 2024, distinguish between the responsibilities of content producers and streaming services. These regimes focus on ensuring that platforms have the technical capability to support and deliver accessibility features, rather than insisting they retrofit or create such features for all third-party content.

IAMAI has therefore recommended that, alongside the sandbox, MIB move away from a one-size-fits-all mandate and instead adopt a flexible implementation framework. Under this model, platforms would be allowed to choose from a menu of recognised accessibility services based on their catalogues, rights arrangements and audience profiles, with a phased roadmap towards the government’s broader inclusion goals.