Last week I anchored a talk on digital advertising at the CASBAA India forum. CASBAA is a TV and video industry association of firms in the Asia-Pacific region. This week I am in Mumbai for the annual Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry or Ficci-Frames conference. It is the biggest media and entertainment industry event in India and is themed around digital this year. Recently, many of the events around this industry have focused heavily on digital. There is incessant talk of how it will change our lives as media consumers and the whole business. And it has, to some extent. But the meaning of digital and digitisation has been lost somewhere in the hype.
A phone, an iPad, the Google home page or the icon of your favourite app -these are the images that hit your mind when the word digital is uttered. But TV is digital too - transmission and reception is largely digitised. Video apps, many of them from large broadcasters or powered with their content, are being launched almost every week. In films, growth has come from digital theatres. You can hear the radio or a podcast on your phone or laptop, both digital. In newspapers, much of the process for capturing news or information and transmitting, producing and printing it are now digital. Most are available online - either as apps, instant articles or standalone websites.
At the back end and front end then, most media are now digitised. That is the first point of this column: digital media is not just about the internet.
The second point is that the benefits of digital, if these are allowed to percolate down the line, can indeed shift paradigms in an industry. The film industry is a great example.
The whole process of digitising moribund film theatres began in 2005 and picked up speed 2008 onwards. Of the 10,000 or so theatrical screens in India more than 70 per cent are now digital. This pushes down print costs, increases the number of screens a film can release in and therefore its ability to make money, and deals a body blow to piracy. The film industry has grown over the last decade and much of the money from higher ticket prices has gone back into the system, helping create a financially healthy and creatively vibrant Indian film industry.
And when the benefits of digital are held back, it can create a mess such as the one we see in TV. Being fully digital could have released Rs 12,000 crore or so of undeclared cash back into the TV business and improved programming variety. That, however, has not happened for several reasons - shifting deadlines, court cases and a micro-managing regulator.
The third point is that many of the boundaries between formats - on reach, revenue or impact - are more for the convenience of analysis rather than for real. Think about it. The internet reaches 319 million people compared to 840 million for TV or about 300 million for newspapers. So it is doing well in terms of reach though it has lagged behind so far on revenues. However, without the take-off of mass media and the content that powers almost all the major websites and apps much of what we call digital media would have been impossible. For example, what would YouTube be without mainstream studio and linear TV content, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of its traffic? The best video apps are the ones that can get the best content - hotstar comes from Star TV and Eros Now from India's largest film studio.
Whether it is Star TV, Eros, Hooq or any other brand, what gets them audiences is the ability to connect, to tell good stories. Most of us really don't care where we saw a good show, a film or read a good book. What we remember is that it was a good story.
All media formats eventually link up with each other - some more, some less. The internet does that, without geographical boundaries and with interactivity thrown in. When TV came everyone talked of radio and print dying and when the internet came there was talk of all media dying. But nothing has died, they just morphed. So newspapers are becoming multimedia apps and television is "on-demand". More people are reading and watching TV and films. Only the firms that make money from these change.
Twitter: @vanitakohlik
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