NETWORK18: THE AUDACIOUS STORY OF A START-UP THAT BECAME A MEDIA EMPIRE
Indira Kannan
Portfolio Penguin, 320 pages, Rs 699
Raghav Bahl gave up his career as a management consultant to set up Television Eighteen in 1993. It made shows for BBC and Star Plus to start with. In 1999, this little TV production firm partnered with CNBC to launch a business channel.
That is when he told this reviewer in an interview some years later that “I thought that we now have the gravitas to attract professional talent.” Haresh Chawla, an Indian Institute of Technology/Indian Institute of Management graduate, with stints at HCL and Times Group, among other firms, was hired with the promise of a free hand in what was till then a company firmly steered by Mr Bahl. Within months came the tough choice of shutting the content production business that had defined TV18 for so long and focusing on broadcasting, or cutting costs across the board. Mr Chawla opted for the former. It was a painful decision that cost Mr Bahl many loyalists but he went with it.
It worked. From Rs 15 crore in 1999, top line grew to Rs 647 crore in March 2008 ahead of rivals NDTV and TV Today. By then Network18 had tie-ups with Viacom, Time-Warner and Infomedia. Unusually for an Indian media firm, more than three-fourths of its revenues and a bulk of its valuation were fuelled by mergers and acquisitions. This led to a build-up of over Rs 1,500 crore in debt, equal to the firm’s revenues then. This in turn finally led to a bail-out by a trust controlled by Mukesh Ambani in 2012. By 2014, the bail-out had culminated in a takeover, and Reliance Industries now owns the majority in the Rs 3,403-crore Network18, which houses brands such as CNBC-TV18, CNN-IBN and Colors, among others. By mid-2014, Mr Bahl had left the company he founded and shaped into one of India’s top ten media firm, albeit richer by Rs 707 crore.
Much of this has been reported by this paper and others. What Indira Kannan’s Network18 : The Audacious Story of a Start-Up That Became a Media Empire does is fill in many of the gaps with anecdotes, stories, information and episodes in the making of Network18. So the story of how CNN-IBN came to be set up or of TV18’s early years making India Business Report (BBC) or the India Show (Star Plus) is fun to read. Ms Kannan, who has worked with Network18 for 16 years till 2011, clearly had incredible access to the people who built the company — Sanjay Ray Chaudhuri, Vandana Malik, R D S Bawa and, of course, Mr Bahl, among others. And that shows throughout the book.
But it also becomes a millstone dragging the book down. The Network18 story is told completely from Mr Bahl’s perspective. In every frame he is a hero who sets out to do only right and good things. A few pages into the book, Ms Kannan’s note of awe/admiration/reverence for everything about Mr Bahl and TV18 strikes you. And it grates till the end, taking away some of the pleasure of reading what is otherwise a competent book.
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The other major flaw is more about contextualising the story against the time and the media environment. In 1993, India had just three-million cable homes, a few channels (with Doordarshan ruling) and a Rs 500-crore market. Mr Bahl showed tremendous foresight in much of what he set out to do: That is evident. By 1999, when he backed the broadcasting business, the market had moved to 33-million cable homes and Rs 8,400 crore in revenues and many more broadcasters.
There was Star, Sony, Zee, Sun, ETV, India TV and many others competing with Network18 in various markets. So the strength of the call to shut TV production was evident. However, much of the contextualisation is only against NDTV. Ms Kannan’s contempt for NDTV shows through remarks about the fact that is full of “people with connections,” of it being better-funded and more privileged than TV18. It is a contempt many Network18 employees, including Mr Chawla, have shared with this reviewer.
Ms Kannan captures the warmth, fun and struggle of a small organisation trying to stand on its feet very well. But she falters when the little production house becomes a media conglomerate. Her context of TV18 is the production house and her sympathies for the ethos of the firm of that time — with lots of bonding and learning from senior people, a close-knit culture that took care of employees and where everybody multi-tasked — shows.
There are stories of copy machine operators and other junior crew members becoming editors, cameraman, et al. According to one estimate, TV18 must have trained at least 100 cameramen who came from modest backgrounds. In unearthing and relating some of these stories, Ms Kannan shines. The anecdotes around the debt, the stress it created and Mr Chawla’s departure are good to know — they help flesh the story that most of us know only factually. Despite its flaws, then, the book is a good read for anyone interested in the evolution of the news industry in India.