How the media industry is not making money at the cost of quality.
Most drawing room conversations on media and entertainment (M&E) end in arguments. That is because much of what is liked or disliked in newspapers, television, films or radio is a matter of taste. This varies across individuals. As the argument gets heated, it inevitably veers towards how the media industry is making money at the cost of quality and how standards are slipping.
Here are two bits on why that is not always correct.
Argument one
The most generous estimate of the Indian media and entertainment business (mine) puts it at $17 billion, or about Rs 80,000 crore. That is less than half the revenues of Walt Disney Corporation, or about twice that of India’s largest mobile company – Bharti Airtel. The single largest media company, Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd, only recently hit a billion dollars in group top line. The mass of companies operates in the Rs 50-crore to Rs 100-crore revenue cluster. M&E is nowhere in size or profits when compared to the hot sectors it is clubbed with – retail, telecom or information technology. All the figures of 600 million viewers, 300-odd million newspaper readers, and the tag of being the largest film industry in the world suggest the potential. Sure, Indian M&E companies are growing well, but they are nowhere close to the big bucks. – Media and entertainment is a big-buck business
Argument two –
In operational terms, the television sector opened up after 1992, newspapers in 2005 and radio in 2006. The news channel boom began in 2003; films became a proper industry only after 2001. Largely, most of the mass media took off only in the last 5-7 years. Given that, competition has been good for business so far. Growth is happening at the cost of quality
For the sake of argument, let us look at television. There are channels for various languages, genres, tastes and income groups. There is the high-brow stuff on National Geographic and Discovery, besides popular programming in an array of languages, including Hindi, English, Tamil, and Bangla on general entertainment channels (GECs). These mix various things – films, soaps, events – to offer a potpourri that dominates more than half of the TV-viewing time in India. In films, there are channels like Lumiere and UTV World Movies for award-winning, festival-circuit films. There also are standard movie channels like Star Movies, HBO and Zee Cinema.
So, growth has brought a lot of variety. But, has that led to better quality? This is where some hard and soft facts have to be faced. Again, let us stick to the television example.
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The first soft fact is that different people have different tastes. For some reason, reviewers and writers on M&E find it difficult to accept that people could enjoy Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi..., though they find it alright if the same lot watches The Bold and the Beautiful. There is, therefore, the intellectual snobbery of reviewers who think that the 600 million Indians who watch TV should have the same taste as them. Ditto for films. Most reviewers went gaga over Udaan, Dev D and Love, Sex aur Dhokha. But, the fact remains that the biggest grossers of the year were Endhiran, Dabangg and 3 Idiots. There is a sort of social schizophrenia at work.
The second fact: Look for quality and you will find it. There is BBC Entertainment, Fx, Fox History and a whole lot of new channels with cutting-edge shows. There isn’t much high-end stuff in Indian languages, but, as the market evolves and enough people demand it and are willing to pay for it, there will be.
The parallel with films is again apt. In the eighties, the only way to distribute a film was through 1,000-seater single-screen theatres. The pressure resulted in popular, at times low-brow films, meant to pull the masses in. Then came multiplexes with 4-5 screens with about 200-300 seats per screen. They improved flexibility and average ticket pricing. This brought down the break-even threshold and made it possible to experiment. The result has been some outstanding films, especially in Hindi cinema. The same thing, call it multiplexing, will happen to TV only when structural issues with the business (digitisation, pay revenues) are sorted out.
The last, and the biggest, (unsaid) reason why the lowest common denominator rules in many genres on TV is that India is, and will remain for a long time, a ‘single-TV-home’ market. This has nothing to do with purchasing power. It is a sociological phenomenon. Indians believe that having more than one TVs will split the family, kids will start watching their own TV and won’t sit with parents, etc. So, all programming is geared to get the family together, and, therefore, GECs rule. The rest is a matter of luck. For every silly show like Rakhi Ka Insaaf, there is a Kaun Banega Crorepati sparkling away brilliantly.
The area that has borne the brunt of the imperfections of this market is news broadcasting, where standards have fallen. That, however, is a separate story that this paper will cover in greater detail soon.