This is not about social interaction but about the industry getting together to fight regulatory and other battles which could propel growth. The Indian media and entertainment (M&E) industry has had a pathetic record of it.
In TV there are half a dozen organisations — of cable operators, DTH (direct-to-home) operators, broadcasters, news broadcasters and so on — each on their own trip. In print while there are fewer organisations, unity is suspect. You see that from the fracas that breaks out every time readership and circulation numbers come out.
Much of this did not materially affect growth till recently. There was so much pent-up demand that advertising revenues and consumer appetite for media have continued to rise in spite of all the structural flaws in the market. Much of that growth has brought this $16-odd billion industry to a stage where millions of dollar worth of investment has been poured in — especially from 2006 to 2008. The issue now is of delivering on the promise of the business.
For that to happen, as the growth rate slows down, fresh growth will have to be mined. Whether it is pay revenues in TV or digital ones in print, owners will have to tackle structural issues like infrastructure, licensing and metrics if their segments have to grow faster.
Take metrics in print, for instance. The two currencies of readership and circulation are constantly challenged. It is not unusual for publishers to jump in and out of circulation audits. In other years, they sue or question the bodies that monitor circulation and readership. These bodies, incidentally, are run by publishers in association with advertisers and media buyers.
If publishers keep questioning the currencies which they use for advertising money, why would advertisers take them seriously? And if there is a problem with the metrics — as everyone keeps saying there is — why not get together to fix it.
To understand how cooperation on broad industry issues could work, just go through the websites of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, the Magazine Advertising Bureau, among others, in the US. In markets that are in decline, these bodies spend time and money on research, done by professional research agencies. This seeks to compare newspapers or magazines with other media on every parameter possible — reach, audience composition, efficacy, time spent and so on.
When you read them, you realise how little the Indian newspaper, magazine or even the TV business does as an industry, to either protect its interests with advertisers or to lobby the general public or the government.
Take the TV business in the US. The Federal Communications (FCC) has, for sometime now, been trying to push through a la carte pricing in cable. But the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) has worked with an army of researchers to prove that applying the principles of voice telephony to price TV content does not make sense. It even created a new metric — such as the price per viewing hour — to bolster its case.
In India, even though price regulation by the broadcast regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), has held back growth for several years now, there has been no major lobbying effort by the industry. Instead, broadcasters are busy pulling each other down, even on a policy platform. So, it seems pointless to suggest that they could fight the regulator by just using some baseline cable pricing numbers.
The film industry is worse. For all the corporatisation, there is still no authentic source for all those box office numbers being churned out. Nor is there any attempt from the various fora — of producers (in Mumbai, the South, the East, all over), multiplex owners, single-screen owners, film artistes, the exporters’ guild, among more than a dozen bodies — to try to get real numbers. In fact, everything differs across states — entertainment tax, the gap between theatrical and TV/home video release, rights to dubbing et al. This makes the life of any film company wanting to go national a nightmare.
As any counsellor would say, come on guys, you can talk this through.
