Premium content production needs to be democratised: JioStar's Uday Shankar

Over 13 years, Uday Shankar took Star India from Rs 1,600 crore to Rs 18,000 crore in revenue when he quit in 2020. He was keen to focus on education and healthcare. But here he is back in media four years later as vice-chairperson of JioStar. The Rs 26,000 crore (revenue FY24) firm is India’s largest media company. It is the product of the merger between Viacom18 Media and Star India. Viacom18 is owned by Reliance Industries (RIL) and Bodhi Tree Systems, a platform owned equally by Shankar and James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems. Star India is a part of The Walt Disney Company. Earlier this week, Vanita Kohli-Khandekar had a long chat with Shankar at his office in Mumbai. Edited excerpts:

 

  What are your priorities with JioStar? 

 

We deliver the largest share of audiences on TV (110 channels such as Colors and Star Plus, 32 per cent viewership) and digital (Disney+Hotstar and JioCinema offer the second-largest audience after YouTube) every day. There are a lot of things that are working very well and my topmost priority is to not spoil them.

 

But in a country with 800-850 million mobile customers, if you (the whole streaming business) have 50-70 million subscribers, then there is a whole world to cover over there. Also, streaming content is still designed for a very elite segment. In a country of 1.5 billion people, if several hundred million people are not coming to your platform every night, then there is a problem. I'm not talking about Instagram, YouTube, and Google but the other premium services. It's a huge opportunity that needs creativity and technological innovation. 

 

Finally, there is a narrative that has got built and accepted that TV is dead. It has become self-fulfilling. Every day you say it's dead and you don't feed it. And since you don't feed it, it is going to die. 

 

Television still has a long runway in India. You're still talking about 90-95 million paying subscribers. There are another 30-40 million free homes (that take DD Freedish). In terms of watch-time (about 4 hours a day), reach (800 million viewers), and advertising value (4-6 times of digital on a per-unit basis), whatever metric you take, it is very powerful. Everywhere in the world, television was very expensive and streaming came as a cheaper alternative. Here, television has a massive price advantage for the consumer (starting at Rs 150 or so per month). If you add up data and subscription costs, streaming is more expensive (anywhere from Rs 400-1,000 a month, depending on packages). In an income-sensitive country, 90-95 million people still pay every month for TV subscription. How could it be dead?

 

The creative, brand, and consumer experience, innovation needs to step up. There is a need to invest in TV, because the returns can still be very substantial. 

 

Could you elaborate on that? 

 

Television has grown in this country in absolute numbers every time somebody has experimented and disrupted. In the first wave, satellite TV itself did that. There was Doordarshan, then Star and Zee came. In 1999-2000, Star Plus did that (with Kaun Banega Crorepati). Then came Colors in 2008. The last serious push to grow TV was when Star rebranded and invested (2009-2013). We grew the sports viewership enormously by going into multiple languages.

 

The case to invest in creativity and consumer experience on TV is strong. The economic drive of India is coming rather heavily from Tier-2, -3 and -4 towns. There is an opportunity to tap into that and participate in the second generation of brand creation. 

 

 What does that mean? 

 

First generation of big city brands like Maruti have been created. There is advertising value to be unlocked from smaller towns. A lot of the brands that are big today — in jewellery, construction materials, et al — were built on platforms like Aaj Tak 20 years ago. (Shankar was earlier news director at Aaj Tak).

 

Similarly, the democratisation of premium content production has to happen. My biggest problem in growing storytelling is access to storytellers. Mumbai continues to be the supplier of all content to Hindi-speaking India. That limits creativity to the talent that is available in Mumbai. If a great storyteller is sitting in Jaunpur, there is no way I can access that person. As long as production infrastructure was the big limitation, you had no choice. But now production infrastructure has become highly accessible and democratised. The creative enterprise needs to go and tap into that. Those are some of the key initiatives we will be taking. 

 

Didn’t YouTube democratise content creation? 

 

Yes, but only for YouTube and Instagram, not for premium destinations. 

 

How would you crack that? 

 

We'll see. I went to the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The slogan used to be: Ek patthar to tabiyat se ucchalo doston, kaun kehta hai aasman mein suraakh nahin ho sakta (Throw one stone at the sky with full force my friends, who says a hole cannot be drilled in the sky?) 

 

Is there an exit timeframe in your mind? 

 

I can't speak for the others but I am a fund. I raised money from others and, therefore, need to provide an exit. We are very focused on that. Reliance and Disney are patient, long-term strategic operators. 

 

The management structure for the merged company seems complicated — three CEOs, several overlaps… 

 

There is a platform-level organisation and then there is a user-level organisation, which is more content-driven. Entertainment and sports are the two streams of content that we have right now. There are two very clear CEOs (Kevin Vaz, entertainment; Sanjog Gupta, sports). And, as far as digital is concerned, there is a platform and a CEO for that (Kiran Mani). The entire technology, user experience, revenue monetisation, all of that sit within. It is a very simple structure. 

 

You worked for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox where you had complete freedom. How is the structure different this time? 

 

It's totally autonomous. There is a set of obligations I have to the shareholders. But beyond that they have totally left me alone. 

 

There is no RIL say... 

 

RIL is the majority shareholder. So, I have to understand what they want. And there is Disney. But once that clarity comes, it is entirely up to me. (Viacom18 owns 46.82 per cent, Disney 36.84 per cent, and RIIL 16.34 per cent. However, since RIL owns over 84 per cent of Viacom18, directly and indirectly, it controls JioStar.) 

 

You had a surprisingly easy time with the Competition Commission of India (CCI). Any challenges you expect on the regulatory front? 

 

Why were you surprised? We are not the regulatory concern. These are businesses that are really under pressure, that need to be supported. Scaling up is one way of propping them up. On ad and viewership share, there are businesses that are much bigger. I'm surprised that CCI was looking at Zee-Sony and us for so long.