It is democracy’s worst nightmare. Imagine that Sun TV and its sister channels have a dominating share of viewership in Tamil Nadu. Its cable arm, SCV controls cable distribution and Sun Direct is the dominating DTH (direct-to-home) player in the state. Its radio network Suryan has a lion’s share of listenership; its magazine Kungumum and newspaper Dinakaran are leaders. Sun.com is the default page on computer screens across the state since it owns the leading ISP. More than 80 per cent of the state’s population decides on how to vote, where to shop, what to buy based on the news, information and entertainment coming from the Sun Group.
None of this has happened of course (except for Sun’s dominance of TV viewership). But does India need to prepare for eventualities like these? There are a few ad-hoc cross-media norms (broadcasters cannot own more than 20 per cent in a DTH firm); do we need more stringent ones? And even if we did, do we have the industry and regulatory maturity to put them in place?
The answer to both is a resounding no. The Indian market and its regulatory bodies simply do not have it in them to deal with something as complex as a fair set of cross-media norms. Yet, the Telecom Regulatory Authority’s (Trai) recent consultation paper on the subject indicates that the government is thinking in that direction.
The primary aim of cross-media norms is to protect plurality so that audiences make an informed choice. This diversity is measured through media ownership — either using ‘share of voice’ (audience) or through market share. Yet this goal, a democratic axiom, has to be tempered with the size imperative. To make money, a media company needs to be big, operate across segments and try to dominate them.
Given these contradictory needs, several countries have opted for ‘share of voice’ measures. For example, the UK regulator, Ofcom, prevents or limits consolidation within a media market or between markets to decrease the likelihood of any one owner wielding too much power. In the US no one entity may own TV stations that in aggregate reach more than 39 per cent of households. There are complex mathematical formulae in place to calculate audience share or market share, based on industry metrics.
This is where India’s immaturity as a media market shows up. In television, battles with TAM Media Research, which brings out the rating data that is the industry currency, are usual. In publishing, newspaper and magazine companies jump in and out of circulation audits or sue readership bodies depending on their convenience. Incidentally both these metrics are monitored by bodies on which media owners, buyers and advertisers sit. In radio there is still no metric that is acceptable to everyone, though it seems that TAM’s RAM will win. The internet, the easiest-to-measure medium, is the Wild West as far as metrics are concerned.
In a market like this how do you measure share of voice or dominance? How do you determine who has a commanding market share?
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On regulatory maturity, thanks to the Trai, some progress has happened. But we are way behind on even basic stuff — there is no policy on convergence, on FDI, on the internet or telecom as media. Sure there are guidelines on many things, but much of media policy in India is ad-hoc. It reacts to a situation at a point in time.
So, if a minister thinks news channels should be controlled, a slapdash content policy is brought out. While telecom companies can get 74 per cent FDI into IPTV, cable and DTH are capped at 49 per cent, so on and so forth.
Most of these are happy signs. They suggest a fast-growing, too-busy-to-deal-with-details market. The growth however has blinded to us to a simple fact — that India is one of smallest, most fragmented media markets in the world. The largest Indian company (Bennett, Coleman) is just under a billion dollars in size. At $12 billion, the whole Indian media and entertainment industry is not even half the size of the world’s fourth largest media company — the $32 billion News Corporation. Or it is an infinitesimal fraction of the $1.6 trillion the business generated globally in 2007, according to PricewaterhouseCooper’s data.
Maybe putting in place the facilitators — a clear FDI policy, a good convergence bill among others — is what regulators should deal with in the first place. When bigger size companies start coming up, the question of who can control how much can be tackled.
The writer is a media consultant and author of The Indian Media Business. vanitakohli@hotmail.com