A gluttony of content

It took a lot of willpower to delete ScrabbleGo from my phone. It had been a family-rattling addiction for almost eight months. Just when I was getting over the cold turkey came Wordle. The word-game-obsessed me is having a very tough time ignoring it. This, even while I have binged through 13 seasons of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, six seasons of Ms Marple, and one of Rocket Boys, all on SonyLiv. Then there was Gehraiyan, No Time to Die, and the fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel on Amazon Prime Video. Last night I finished watching Badhaai Do and began The Fame Game on Netflix and A Very English Scandal on SonyLiv. Meanwhile, there are three Malayalam films on my “must watch” list, The Economists are piling up, so are books I bought, and at least half a dozen podcasts waiting to be heard.

The choices of shows, books, magazines, films or music might differ, but this is the story of millions of Indians. We are drowning in a sea of “content”. There are just too many films, TV shows, web series, news articles, videos, podcasts and songs to ever be consumed.

For someone who grew up with the state-owned Doordarshan and a single newspaper, this post-liberalisation deluge has been wonderful. India now has over 900 channels, thousands of newspapers, over 860 radio channels and we make more than 1,600 films in a normal year.

When streaming took off in 2018, the deluge became a flood. With more than 60 video and over 15 music streaming services and dozens of short video apps there is now an obscenely rich spread of shows, series, short videos, and news on tap, all the time.

Think of it this way. There was a time when we rarely ate out. If we did, it would be at the neighbourhood family restaurant which served tandoori roti, dal fry, and some paneer or chicken dish. That was our big treat growing up, at least in suburban Mumbai. Fine dining places were rare and the few five-star hotels were outside our reach. Now there is a choice of cuisines —Italian, Japanese, French, Greek, Korean or Chinese —among dozens of others.

Take this a step further. Imagine that you are eating a choice of superbly cooked world cuisines every day of your life —on demand. That is what has been happening to our media choices for the past four years. To begin with, it is phenomenally stimulating. You gorge greedily on all the docu-series, films, and shows from across the world. You discuss them excitedly with friends, neighbours, and colleagues. Then, either you give up, or start falling behind, or, like me, consume so much that you get sick. It is the sickness induced by feasting on an obscenely, rich spread every day for four years.

The impact of this gluttony is manifold.

One, and the most obvious one, is our tastes and expectations as consumers are changing. We expect a Pushpa or Gangubai Kathiawadi to have the same cinematic quality as anything else from across the world.

Two, the average time spent on media has gone up. Just online consumption (news, entertainment et al.) in India has jumped from 1.6 to over 2.2 hours a day, going by the Comscore data. Add TV (just over four hours), other media, and the figure is closer to seven-eight hours a day.

Three, and not surprisingly, our ability to savour, appreciate, and discuss things drops. If the whole economics of media was based on the repeat value of a piece of content earlier, that goes out for a toss. Forget repeating something, it would be a wonder if many of the overdosed consumers remember a book or a show.

Four, this gluttony is leading to a deepening crisis in the media business. The quality of content has meant costs are rising by anywhere from two to four times. Even though it is growing faster, streaming doesn’t offer the same returns as say newspaper publishing or linear TV. Take video, for instance.

In the US, where pay TV bundles averaged $100 a month, Netflix retails much better programming for $10-20 a month. However, just like in publishing or music, digital brings in way lower per unit monetisation. As long as there wasn’t much competition, things coasted along for Netflix. But with Disney, Prime Video, Apple TV and everyone else upping the game, Netflix has had two weak quarters in spite of 27 Oscar nominations and record-breaking shows such as Money Heist and Squid Game. Its margins for 2022 are expected to be weaker. In all, American media firms will spend more than $230 billion on video content this year, nearly double the figure a decade ago, according to Ampere Analysis, a research firm quoted by The Economist. But analysts are now fretting that rising costs will spoil any chance of a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

Back home in India, investment in only video OTT content was about $1.2 billion in 2021, according to the Media Partners Asia data. The entire business earned just about $1.9 billion in advertising and pay revenues. The path to profits then is going to be long and hard. Many are now course correcting by offering only a few episodes at a time instead of dumping the whole season in one ago. Others are looking at reality, sports and gaming, or bundling many more things. The other hope, of course, is consolidation. As markets grow, some players are bound to shut shop or get acquired.

Broadcast television was a mad gaggle in the nineties and early part of the millennium; now five broadcasters have 70 per cent of the audience share. That is bound to happen online too to video, music, and publishing.

Where would that leave consumers like us? Gasping for breath or finally focusing on our lives instead of a screen? 

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