Over the past month, Turkey's TV sector has been awash with reports that local platforms BluTV and Puhu TV will soon stream their content online to subscribers. In addition to this online streaming, the two Turkish platforms announced that they will produce their own original TV shows.

International giants like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime have been widely successful broadcasting their own original digital content, with Netflix and Amazon Prime available on the Turkish market. Turkey’s companies have decided to experiment with global trends that use the internet to spread new ways of media consumption. There is a lot of curiosity about the audience’s reaction to these projects in Turkey, a country that is known for one of the highest broadcasting rates of TV shows in the world.

BluTV, founded by the Dogan group, celebrated its first anniversary Jan. 23. BluTV streams 30 TV channels live and also offers about 1,100 films and 700-800 hours of TV shows. Their slogan is “without commitment, without installation, without ads.” To attract more users to its platform, the management also made accessible part of the subscription services to viewers outside Turkey, probably targeting the diaspora eager to stay connected to their homeland through watching programs in their native tongue. The novelty that brought the most attention to BluTV in the news this year was “Masum” (“Innocent”), Turkey's first online streaming series broadcast Jan. 27. In contrast with the usual 2½-hour-long episodes of soap operas broadcast on TV, each of the eight episodes of “Innocent” would be 60 minutes long. Long working hours and the duration of episodes have troubled the employees of Turkish drama sets for a while now. There have been many complaints by unions and actors that organized an industry-wide movement in 2015, for improving standards of work on the set. Now it remains to be seen whether “Innocent” will bring a more durable change or set a new standard in the sector with its shorter episodes.

Regardless, the director of BluTV, Aydin Dogan Yalcindag, has said that Turkey is a difficult market and that there are two big challenges: the pirates and internet quotas, referring to the availability of internet, but lack of fast internet. In addition, they are dealing with very expensive selling of data on mobile devices. “These are big obstacles, but none of these can stop the change. They can only slow down the process,” Yalcindag said.