The future of television

Amazon Prime Video’s Panchayat is a delightful watch. City boy Abhishek Tripathi accepts the job of secretary, Phulera gram panchayat, Uttar Pradesh, because he has no option. The lack of a proper house, food, electricity, his fight to keep the village’s open defecation free status, to get solar lights, etc is what Panchayat’s two seasons of eight episodes each tackle with warmth and humour. It was especially soothing after the obsessive binging on the deluge of short videos of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial. The court proceedings, that concluded this June in the US, have been available in short clips on every social media platform you can name. 

At some point in June, I also watched S S Rajamouli’s RRR (a stylised rendition of the 80s Hindi film) on Netflix. For Tom Cruise’s superb sequel to Top Gun and Raj Mehta’s Jugjugg Jeeyo (Dharma) a funny yet wise take on marriage we went to the theatre. This is besides the quick in-between shots of SonyLiv’s sweet Gullak (TVF) and my perpetual favourite The Big Bang Theory (Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady). 

This June then, like all other months, has been a smorgasbord of short videos, sitcoms, long films and serious series. From 10 seconds to 10 hours, a spectrum of video watching is now available on-demand, in theatre and on TV. That brings us to the point of this column. Where does TV, the screen that has for long dominated all video watching, fit into this spectrum? Who’s watching it and where? 

In 2021, about 878 million Indians watched TV for an average of three hours and 50 minutes a day going by Broadcast Audience Research Council data. At Rs 72,000 crore in revenues (ad plus pay) it still brings in the biggest chunk (45 per cent) of India’s Rs 161,400-crore media and entertainment business. Almost half of what is watched on OTT is produced and aired first on TV channels such as Zee TV or Colors. Some of the largest OTT brands in India — Disney+Hotstar, SonyLIV — are owned by broadcasters. Even on short video apps, clips of TV shows and news do very well. As a source of content, TV is very well-placed in this new ecosystem.

Its position as India’s dominant media is where trouble is brewing. From 210 million homes reaching 892 million viewers in 2019, TV now reaches 193 million homes and 878 million viewers. 

The reasons are not hard to find. When the ill-conceived New Tariff Order was implemented in early 2019, many cable operators did not have the technology that could deal with adding or removing single channels easily. The pain of the switchover, coupled with the increase in prices pushed homes to switch to OTT at the high-end and DD Freedish, Doordarshan’s free DTH service, at the lower-end. The pandemic and a second tariff order in 2019 accelerated this trend. 

Pay TV homes across DTH and cable are now estimated to be down to 120-130 million from about 180 million. Of all the technologies that transmit TV signals, cable has been the worst hit, falling from over 100 million to about 75-80 million homes. The biggest gainer has been DD Freedish, which has gone from about 25 to an estimated 50 million homes. Note that these numbers have to be multiplied by 4.8, the average Indian family size, to arrive at the number of viewers. 

The other big gainer has been OTT, specifically YouTube. It has risen from about 285 million unique visitors (viewers) in September 2019 to over 485 million this February, going by Comscore data. It is now India’s largest “free broadcaster”, albeit on-demand. It is also the only serious competition to DD Freedish and to every short video app as well as to pay TV. 

Much of what is happening in India is reflected in global markets too. Tony Gunnarsson, principal analyst TV, video and advertising at the UK-based Omdia, points out that pay TV is growing in South Korea, Indonesia and France among other countries while declining sharply in some such as the US, India and Brazil. The interest in bundles, which offer high-end cable channels with OTT and internet access, continue to drive growth and consumption. There are still more pay TV homes than SVoD (subscription driven video-on-demand) homes in the world. In India, cable has simply not become the broadband provider it is in the US, where a bulk of OTT viewing happens in broadband enabled cable homes. 

This then is a period of transition. If you add films, TV and OTT, the video business in India is roughly Rs 96,300 crore in revenue. TV is over four times the online video business and about eight times film. It is also much more profitable. And most of the big broadcasters — Sony, Zee, Viacom, Disney — have done a good job of hanging on to their viewers while transitioning online. 

“As a European when I think of broadcast media I think of public service broadcasters like BBC (Britain) or NRK (Norway). Most of the public service broadcasters have made the transition already successfully. The future proofing of broadcasting is already happening through the iPlayer (the BBC’s digital offering) and it is not in competition with Netflix/Sky. They are doing what they do best, investing in local content. Therefore, broadcasting TV will continue through adoption of newer methods,” says Mr Gunnarsson. 

TV’s spot on the new video ecosystem building up is certain. What we will be calling it is not. 

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