<b>Vanita Kohli-Khandekar:</b> My media wish list for Christmas

A proactive ministry, a unified industry and the ability to tell our stories globally are my wishes to make Indian media and entertainment bigger, better and more global

India is the world's largest producer of films, it is the second largest market by TV homes and mobile phones, one of the fastest growing digital markets and a growing print market. Yet it is one of the most under-monetised ones. Just one small example: For 240 million TV viewers, Indonesia generates over $6 billion in TV advertising revenues against India's $2.5 billion for 800 million viewers.

For someone who has been covering this industry for 15 years now, the gap between what it can achieve and what it has, is a source of immense frustration. Especially because all the building blocks are there - a functioning democracy (of sorts), a reasonably liberal media regime, a healthy film, TV, print industry that generates tonnes of content that Indians love. Yet Indonesia, China, Korea, Brazil all do better on most metrics such as per capita advertising spends or media spend to GDP. The Indian media and entertainment (M&E) industry's Rs 100,000 crore revenues does not in any way do justice to the size of the market, its robustness and the sheer joy this industry offers Indian audiences.

Here then are my three wishes that could help this wonderful industry achieve its full glory.

• Can we have a more proactive Ministry of Information and Broadcasting? In August this year the auctioning of licenses in the third phase of FM radio's expansion, four years after the policy was announced, has been the first major 'initiative' from the ministry since 2011. The trouble with a ministry - irrespective of the political party in power - is that anything that involves media and entertainment is inevitably looked at only from the content/influence/control lens, not the business one. The ministry, it would seem, is oblivious to the fact that the industry generates millions of jobs, several thousand crores in taxes and license fees.
  

 

But for any ministry or body to think of and implement stuff like rationalised entertainment tax or an even playing field among DTH, cable and IP needs an industry that has more foresight than the Indian one. So my second wish is an M&E industry that acts in unison on key issues with research to back its major lobbying points.

Every part of the Indian industry - print, TV, radio, films, digital - is plagued by internal division which colour, mutilate and, at times, completely subvert any attempt at lobbying for the industry's cause. In films, multiplexes and single screens speak in different voices. Producers, studios and distributors are a force unto themselves. There are dozens of guilds claiming to represent producers, actors, writers, exhibitors, across regions and what not. Little wonder then that when a movie is targeted by protestors, the police or courts have no one body that represents the industry, to turn to. This means every company or producer fights a lone battle weakening what is otherwise a creatively robust business.

Within TV for instance the Indian-foreign broadcasters, the platform owner versus broadcaster or content owner versus distributor splits come into play while lobbying. Where for instance is a simple graphic that shows that real prices in cable have actually fallen in India over the last 20 years? That alone is the biggest rallying point distribution firms and broadcasters can use against the warped, telecom-oriented price regulation of TV pricing in India.

n And that brings me to the last wish. The number of languages, the regions, the layers, the genres and the management talent on display make the Indian media market an interesting place compared to, say, China or Korea, which are big and profitable but fairly homogenous. Yet in markets such as the Asia Television Forum in Singapore recently or the ones in Europe, Hong Kong or some other place, India remains near-absent or absent. In global media conferences it is not a very discussed market. One reason is the insularity of Indian media managers who are, rightly, focussed on things at home. The other, say conference organisers, is that Indian speakers have the bad habit of confirming and then backing out at the last minute.

Whatever the reasons can the industry please go out there and tell its story - to investors, consumers and policymakers. Because when growth plateaus in India, we will need to look outside. This is the time to set the global stage - when Indian M&E is a rising, fun market.
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