It is time we had a serious chat about the Indian media and entertainment business. One that explores core issues instead of hovering around the same old conversations. Consider this. At forums, in media or among top managers, digital media makes up more than 90 per cent of the conversation. Everybody obsesses about Facebook, Twitter and Google. The internet, however, is only five per cent or so of India’s total spending on advertisements.
News forms eight per cent of national viewing time and 10 per cent of the total ad spend on TV. But what TV news channels do or don’t do has dominated proceedings, ad nauseam, at every media forum I have attended in the last five years.
You could argue that there is nothing wrong with this. Just like countries and people, industries too get stereotyped. So India is about call centres and the media is all about news. What it does, however, is stop all celebration, discussion or debate around the real things happening in the media business in one of the world’s largest markets.
Sample some of the more interesting stories from the media business.
In December last year, Business Man, a film starring Telugu superstar Mahesh Babu, did roaring business in Bilaspur and Raipur (Chhattisgarh). “On weekends we were sold out 100 per cent,” says Sumant Bhargava, managing director of Stargaze Entertainment. His firm owns Glitz, a chain of theatres with 22 screens across small-town India. The reasons are prosaic: Bilaspur is the railway hub of India and houses a huge population of Telugu-speakers who have lived for as long as anyone can remember.
Bilaspur only confirms what has been evident for a long time. Across the country, single-screen digital (and non-digital) chains and multiplexes are bringing audiences back to the theatres, reviving regional cinema and forcing filmmakers to make more films for that audience. Last week we did a story on the big studios pushing into Marathi, Bangla, Punjabi and South Indian films. This is happening because the availability of screens in small towns now allows a film company to monetise India’s heterogeneity.
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Here is another one. Agrowon, a Marathi daily for farmers, is one of the most successful newspaper launches in the last few years. Launched by the Rs 500-crore Sakaal Group in April 2005, Agrowon sells over 89,000 copies and earns Rs 12 crore in revenue, according to the company. The 16-page tabloid, selling at Rs 2 a copy, has eight editions that are based on agro-climatic zones in Maharashtra. Its reporters and editors are graduates and postgraduates from agricultural colleges in Maharashtra.
Yoda was the best innovation by a news channel. It is software that NDTV developed to make shooting with multiple cameras simpler and cheaper.
The biggest issue in the media industry today is not the tabloidisation of news, but the ownership of media – newspapers, TV channels, cable systems – by politicians and their ilk. Hardly any forum or daily has raised this issue or discussed its long-term impact on the fabric of this business.
The other big issue? The financial health of this business. Except for newspapers, almost every segment is in bad shape. If we don’t come up with policy initiatives to facilitate growth, there is no way we can ever fulfil the promise that an audience of 1.2 billion people offers. Nor can we generate all the jobs and taxes this sector is capable of.
Two simple things would help, to start with. One, let digital cable and direct-to-home (DTH) get a tax holiday for, say, 10 years. This will push digitisation and transparency, plug revenue leakages, tackle piracy and improve content all in one go.
Two, give either infrastructure status or a tax holiday for digitising cinema screens and setting up new ones across India. We are one of the most under-screened countries in the world, with 9,000 screens. The US, for instance, has 39,000-odd screens for 320 million people. If India had even 20,000 screens, the film industry could easily double in size, improve profitability, employ millions of more people and generate crores in taxes. Not to mention offer much more variety in languages.
None of these moves is fraught with political risk, a big factor in any kind of policy making now. They are common-sense facilitators that many countries have used to build media infrastructure.
If only the media could tear itself away from navel-gazing, it may actually play a positive role in the growth of the industry of which it is a part.