Somewhere in the gap between a film shoot and a balance sheet lies a problem that has quietly frustrated Indian producers working with British partners for years: a co-production agreement exists on paper, but the practical machinery — who owns what, whose crew qualifies, how royalties flow back, what happens when a streaming platform sub-licenses to a third market — remained unclear enough to deter serious capital. The India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), coming into force later this month, addresses that gap directly.
The agreement does not conjure film shoots out of thin air. Prachi Shrivastava, founding advisor at Lawfinity Solutions, put it plainly: "A trade agreement doesn't, by itself, bring film shoots to a country. What the FTA adds is mostly enabling: easier movement of crew and creative professionals, more certainty around intellectual property and its enforcement, and more confidence for UK studios and streamers investing in Indian production." The value is structural, not promotional.
What the Deal Actually Changes
The India-UK Film Co-Production Agreement — which already recognises qualifying projects as both British and Indian productions for incentive purposes — was operational before CETA. But it sat atop layers of practical friction that the new trade pact begins to clear. According to Alay Razvi, managing partner at Accord Juris, CETA can support co-productions, joint content development, licensing and distribution while strengthening copyright protection and digital enforcement. That last phrase matters most for streaming platforms, where monetisation depends almost entirely on how cleanly content can be licensed across jurisdictions.
Ishan Johri, partner at Khaitan and Co, noted that CETA complements the existing cultural agreements between the two countries. For a producer in Mumbai negotiating with a British Film Institute-backed production company, the difference between a cultural agreement and a binding trade chapter on intellectual property is the difference between a handshake and a contract.
The sector is substantial. According to the FICCI-EY report cited in the LiveMint analysis, India's media and entertainment industry reached ₹2.78 trillion in 2025 and is projected to grow to ₹2.86 trillion in 2026 before accelerating at a compound annual growth rate of over 7% to reach ₹3.3 trillion by 2028. At that scale and trajectory, the question is not whether Indian content can attract international partners — it already does. The question is whether Indian producers extract full value from those partnerships, or whether they remain structurally the cheaper end of a deal weighted toward the licensing party.
The IP Sovereignty Problem
This is where CETA's significance sharpens. For most of its history, Indian content sold internationally on a model that resembled a clearance sale: acquire the rights cheaply, distribute widely, keep the royalties offshore. The economics worked for the buyer. They worked less well for the Indian studio that created the underlying intellectual property and then watched it generate revenue across markets it could never fully track or claim.
Stronger cross-border copyright protection — embedded now in a binding bilateral framework rather than a voluntary cultural agreement — changes the calculus. Indian studios licensing content to UK distributors or streaming platforms operate under enforceable terms, not just contractual goodwill. A regional language film that finds an audience in the British South Asian diaspora can generate royalty streams that actually return to the producer. CETA provides the infrastructure to support this.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has consistently backed this direction. India already holds bilateral co-production treaties with Italy, Germany, France, Brazil, and New Zealand. The UK addition deepens a framework that India's information and broadcasting apparatus has steadily constructed over two decades. At WAVES and FICCI Frames summits, the Ministry has articulated a clear ambition: India as a global content production hub, with bilateral IP and co-production agreements as the structural foundation. CETA is a significant part of that structure.
The Streaming Dimension
OTT platforms complicate and enrich the picture simultaneously. The traditional film co-production model assumed theatrical release as the primary window, with ancillary rights following. Streaming has inverted that hierarchy: for many productions, the platform deal is the primary commercial event, and theatrical is the promotional vehicle. This means that IP ownership, sub-licensing rights, and territorial exclusivity clauses — the precise provisions that CETA's services chapter addresses — are now the core commercial question.
For Indian streaming platforms with global ambitions, the treaty creates a more navigable environment in one of their most important diaspora markets. The British South Asian community represents substantial demand for Indian content, from Bollywood releases to Tamil and Telugu productions to original web series. The friction has historically been less about demand and more about deal structure: how quickly could a platform clear rights for UK distribution, what exclusivity terms were enforceable, how were revenue shares from UK subscriptions reported and remitted. A bilateral trade framework with an explicit IP chapter reduces the transaction cost of answering those questions.
This also matters for the emerging generation of Indian independent filmmakers who lack the legal infrastructure that studio productions bring to international deals. A clearer bilateral framework levels that playing field modestly, though the risk — which analysts working on similar issues have flagged — is that stronger formal IP protections primarily benefit large organised studios while inadvertently disadvantaging smaller regional language producers who have historically operated in more informal cross-border arrangements. The implementation details of CETA's creative industries provisions will determine whether small producer interests are accommodated or crowded out.
The Precedent CETA Sets
There is a signal embedded in this deal that extends well beyond the India-UK bilateral. India's decision to include audiovisual services in a comprehensive trade agreement is a deliberate departure from how most major economies handle the creative sector in trade negotiations. The European Union has historically excluded audiovisual services from its own FTAs, citing a cultural exception doctrine that treats screen content as too important to national identity to expose to commercial trade logic. India has taken the opposite position: its creative economy is a strength to be internationalised, not a vulnerability to be sheltered.
That is not a small choice. It positions India as an economy confident enough in its cultural output to compete in global markets on commercial terms, and it creates a template that Indian negotiators can carry into the ongoing India-EU Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement talks and the India-Canada CEPA discussions. If IP and co-production frameworks work in the India-UK context, the argument for analogous provisions in those negotiations gains concrete evidence rather than theoretical aspiration. The UK deal, in this reading, is as much about what comes next as what it delivers immediately.
The creative economy corridor that CETA formalises between India and the UK will not transform overnight. Studios still need to identify projects, secure financing, assemble crews, and navigate regulatory approval processes on both sides. But the enabling environment — clearer IP terms, easier talent movement, enforceable copyright across markets — is now substantively better than it was. For an industry that generated ₹2.78 trillion last year and is growing faster than most of India's traditional export sectors, that improved environment compounds quickly. The real measure of CETA's success in the media space will be visible in royalty statements arriving from London, and in the confidence of Indian producers who choose to license rather than sell.
