Quibbles of a media reporter

Welcome to my annual self-indulgence as a media writer — a list of quibbles. Read them carefully and you will know that these have ramifications beyond one person’s ability to cover India’s Rs 1,61,400-crore media and entertainment business.
 

By April 2023, when all regulatory clearances are through, Punit Goenka will lead India’s third-largest media company. The combined Sony-Zee, with a revenue of Rs 15,056 crore, is a necessity if traditional media companies are to compete with tech-media players such as Google (estimated revenue of Rs 25,000 crore) or Meta (Rs 16,189 crore). There is no argument with the business logic of mergers.
 

My beef (the first one) is that consolidation makes access to information and managers a pain. Of the top five broadcasters, Zee is the only one currently available to talk — easily.
 

Star went behind a veil the moment Disney acquired it. If you do not want to reproduce press releases or sound bytes, then there is nothing you can write about Disney Star. The joke among journalists is that before they can make coffee or switch on their terminals, managers at Disney India need to check with Burbank, California, where the $83-billion Disney is headquartered. Sony talks sporadically and with great difficulty, ditto for Viacom18. Kalanithi Maran, founder and chairman of Sun Network, was relatively easy to meet if you were in Chennai from 2000 to 2004. Later, some senior managers would give interviews if I was in the city. But for more than a decade now, the firm has shut itself up completely.
 

That brings us back to Zee. Since it is being merged with a taciturn Sony, I worry. If it goes behind the veil, there goes my ability to cover the largest part of India’s media and entertainment business, broadcasting.
 

Add to this the Broadcast Audience Research Council’s decision earlier this year to not share data with the media. Without ratings and data on audience and channel share, how is one supposed to figure anything? These days I have taken to requesting friendly media agencies to share data, but that is not a sustainable way to cover a Rs 72,000-crore business.
 

That then is my second beef. Increasingly, metrics are being treated like a problem area or a dirty secret rather than a tool to be used to improve content, ad rates or subscription revenues.
 

Traditionally, media metrics have been taken seriously in India. Readership surveys for print began in 1974, and the diary method of measuring TV ratings in 1983. Then came electronic ratings with TAM in 1991. This meant that advertisers could see a medium’s growth and invest in it. Programmers knew what was working and what was not. Now it has become a war zone. Broadcasters are at loggerheads with the rating agencies, ditto for publishers.
 

Digital is the worst offender with no robust third-party metrics. You could point to Comscore, Nielsen, App Annie, SimilarWeb and others. But many major video apps and sites do not allow third-party measurement because that means giving server access. As a result, online, supposedly the most transparent medium, is a dark data hole. Try getting a list of the top ten streaming brands that everyone agrees on and has no caveats; it is impossible. For every thousand people online, advertisers pay just a third (or less) of what they pay for print or TV. Without decent third-party metrics, there is no way digital can match or surpass the CPM (cost per thousand) that traditional media gets.
 

That brings us to my last beef — the constant bashing of Hindi cinema. It is a classic case of cutting your nose to spite your face. To repeat what this column has said often, India is one of the few countries that has withstood the might of Hollywood to create its own unique cinema. Just 34 foreign films can be screened in China in a year. Most European countries restrict the amount of Hollywood fare. India (thankfully) has no such restrictions. Yet, 90 per cent of its theatrical revenues comes from Indian films. Only 10 per cent goes to Hollywood. Indians want to watch these films not because they have no choice, but because these tell the stories they want to watch — Omkara, Johnny Gaddaar, Sairat, Andhadhun, Badhaai Ho, Drishyam, Jai Bhim, Care of Kancharapelam or Asuran, to name a few.
 

Indians buying tickets to watch their cinema is what brought 60 per cent of the Rs 19,100 crore the business made in 2019, the last normal year. The remaining 40 per cent came from TV and OTT. Historically, films have constituted a fourth of all that is watched on TV and a third on OTT platforms. Cinema is the core of India’s creative ecosystem feeding TV, OTT, advertising, music and several other businesses.
 

More importantly, Indian cinema is the best marker of its soft power. Many countries would give an arm and leg to have it. If reports are to be believed, there were worried meetings in China when 3 Idiots and Dangal did well there. Yet, there is very little celebration and acknowledgment of this power or its contribution to the economy. If the UK can think of building a statue to Raj and Simran, characters from the 1995 classic Dilwale Dulhania Le Jaayenge, why can’t we? These movies generate income, taxes and employment. Currently about 2.5 million people work across TV, OTT and film.
 

What is intriguing is that the people who spout vitriol about Hindi cinema have nothing to say about Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi or Kannada movies. Is it because they don’t get the language? Or because all non-Hindi movies are classics? Among the almost 2,000 films India makes in a normal year, there will be good, bad, average ‘Indian’ films across languages and regions. Then why this selective bashing of Hindi cinema?
 

Note that to an outsider RRR is as Indian as Brahmastra. What they see is a country that is denigrating its own cinema, one that has stood the test of time for 109 years. In the coming year, could we then stand up for India’s prowess in cinema just like we do for it in information technology, science or management?
Happy 2023.

Twitter: @vanitakohlik