Guest Column: Anup Chandrasekharan, COO – Regional Content, IN10 Media Network, writes on the challenges in the streaming and broadcast industry in the light of the proposed mega-mergers and more
Anup Chandrasekharan
Published –
Dec 30, 2023 8:49 AM
|
7 min read
The new year bells ring in full swing as the year winds up but it chimes so low in the entertainment industry. Is it the complexities of the entire plethora emancipating a flavour of hopelessness in the market? With the theatre and linear TV era losing all its shine, there popped up streaming platforms which turned out to be pocket theatres at hand. An era fading out to another. A hope being mantled in another form.
But this year the reality was nothing but a melee of stupor confusion. It is indeed sad news that one of India’s biggest and most profitable networks – Disney India – is on the block and another profitable company like Zee is in a similar situation. Every day there are new twists and turns in this story of Disney-Jio and Sony-Zee. Last week’s announcement of Jio and Disney signing a non-binding agreement prompts that anything can happen in the end.
A few years ago, there was this news of the Reliance-Sony agreement, which had so many twists happening in between, and in the last minute, Reliance decided not to go ahead with the deal. Let’s assume if the much-awaited Sony deal with Zee doesn’t happen and so is the case of the Jio-Disney deal, what will be the repercussions in the industry. The other big challenge that one can envisage happening with consolidation is the emergence of one monopoly player in the market, dominating our industry. This is a dangerous proposition, and the market can take a back seat and will turn out to be a disaster, especially in terms of creativity and innovation. Content costs and talent costs getting to be governed and dictated by one player will not be good for the overall industry growth. Competition forces companies to innovate. This is good for advertises and viewers but with no competition it is only one way and my way.
Disney India on the block surprises all of us. Their broadcast segment is profitable, and it defies all logic to see them do a desperate deal with Jio. Having bought the network from Fox at a steep valuation, giving it up so easily and so quickly makes me question the team at Burbank. The big question is how Disney then bought this dream earlier of buying Star India at such valuations. The greatest flaw observed in Disney India is also not investing in content aggressively to populate the momentum around cricket and thus failing to hit the bull’s eye. Disney India, obviously, started playing the P&L game and it’s obvious that their long-term vision got blurred.
The year 2023 was lost in the name of consolidation happening or not happening. Exodus of talent from one network to another network, immediate claims of supremacy in specific TGs and claims of digital vs traditional became a laughingstock for outsiders. The biggest worry for me which was witnessed this year is the claim and counterclaim by broadcasters’ performance in specific TGs and specific time bands creating chaos in the ecosystem on what to comprehend from all this. Are we killing our industry with such short-lived banters? Should we not be focusing all our decibel levels for promoting the right content rather than engaging in small gimmicks? The time has come for BARC to step in and have a clear template or control dissemination on acceptable TGs so that claims can be made rather than confusing everyone. The biggest mistake that happened in our industry is also the ridiculous pricing in which cricket and movies were also bought in 2023. In the name of customer acquisition all of them dipped themselves into a blood bath – proclaimed that blood is marketable and it’s a disaster for the entire industry as it just didn’t make any financial sense to buy those assets at that value. This short-sightedness will result in a disaster from which the industry will take time to recover.
The other big worry is the pricing at which movies are bought by platforms. The platforms seem to have chased big names and big directors and, in the bargain, lost sight of cherry-picking good quality content. The name of the game in movies is packaging for it to be bought by platforms. Have a Director/ Hero package and don’t worry about the content, the most often-heard lexicon in our circle. There is a sense of panic in our industry with the incumbent players playing a quick-fix game, thus resulting in the collapse of the entire industry. Only time will answer all the questions about when and how we are going to recover from the bad decisions taken in 2023.
The bigger or macro discussion in 2023 was about TV losing to Digital, and chord-cutting. The big question is what viewers can expect. People are spending more time on YouTube, Instagram and Gaming. Well, is our industry a Media and Entertainment Industry or Technology and Entertainment industry, is our industry on the verge of Collapsing, Reshaping, or Rebranding? Time will only tell. In India, an average household pays less than Rs 200 for more than 100 channels. Can pay-driven streaming platforms survive in a price-conscious Indian market or if it’s an ad-driven model, ads while watching on streaming are a nuisance value and we normally tend to skip. What is the price that advertisers are willing to pay for impressions, and the bigger question is the credibility of these impressions reported by each platform. Is anybody validating it? Streaming initially was ad-free but that’s not true anymore. Does this mean we have to live with ads in streaming?
The streaming platforms in India have also spoken about saturation in SVOD revenues from Tier 1 towns and the need to go mass and target Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns. Would that mean massification of content and if this massification happens will the platforms take the TV route and see the start of saas bahu dramas in streaming platforms. This is exactly what happened in television – linear TV boasted of good fictions shows like Malgudi Days, Fauji, Buniyaad, Bharat Ek Khoj and Rajani but when we started targeting mass, premium content took a back seat, mass content became order of the day with a huge dependence on advertising revenue. We all then started working backwards on content costs. Will this then be the beginning of the end of quality premium and big-spend web series content?
The honeymoon period for streaming platforms in India is over. While their head offices will want to report profitability, will these platforms start getting down on their content spends? Well, with TV viewership and spends down, streaming was supposed to be the solution. But next year will streaming also go slow? None of us know the answer to these. The bigger questions for these giants entering the Indian market are – if they find the pie is not sufficient or big enough, they will exit India in no time like what is happening with Disney in India.
In all this chaos, the talent pool currently working with broadcasters and streamers is in an ambiguous state of mind as nothing is happening and the adrenaline rush is missing with so much uncertainty. The creative talent pool in the market is also completely confused with the prevailing situation. The theatrical footfall is limited to larger canvas, big stars and big directors, and with platforms likely on the verge of cutting content costs, nobody has a clue to what the future beholds them.
Change is inevitable but it must always be looped with hope and bliss. I still hope these impediments will be nullified and cleared just to ensure that we have a lineage in the past and will have in future. It is our responsibility to dialogue the above quoted retrospections and to mend.
(The views expressed are personal.)
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Anup chandrasekharan
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