From Times Group to Zee, Indian media business in the post-pandemic world

Google India is now among India’s top three media companies, along with Disney Star and the Zee Group. Times Group moves down a bit. That is the first thing that jumps out when you look at the list of India’s top Indian media and entertainment firms.

Among the many stories it tells, four stand out — the red­e­fining of the media company, the domination of video, the rise of subscription/pay reve­nues, and the pivoting of print.

Business Standard makes this list every year based on annual reports, company estimates, and those from Media Partners Asia (MPA). This time, the data over the decade ended 2019 (which was a good, normal year) was juxtaposed with the first full year of the post-pandemic results.

The post-pandemic list tells just one story — that of utter devastation. Going by Ficci-EY figures, the industry plummeted from Rs 1.82 trillion to Rs 1.38,300 trillion (close to 2016 levels). Not surprisingly, almost all the top firms have seen a fall in revenue.

Google India’s 2020 reve­n­ue estimates are not availa­ble, but here is an indication. One of the fastest growing chu­nks of its business, YouTube, did not grow over (calendar) 2019 and 2020. Zee Group looks particularly bad because of the change in accounting at Dish TV. Disney Star’s 2019-20 resu­lts are not available, so it is di­f­ficult to gauge the fall. (Many of these firms have different accounting periods that causes variations while adjusting for the Indian financial year.)

Take the four big things that stand out.

One, there is no clear definition, shape or contour of a media company. Globally, telecom, technology and media firms are collapsing into one simple search for audiences. Google, Amazon, AT&T, Face­book, Disney, Comcast, Apple, and Netflix, among others, are leading this search. And, more than 1.6 billion people across the world are on Whats­App — sharing, pictures, short videos or simply chatting.

What then is WhatsApp? A chat app, a media company, a short video brand or an aggregator? There are millions of Indians watching Narcos (Spa­n­ish/Colombia), French watc­h­ing Sacred Games (Hindi­/In­dia), Americans watching The Crown (English/Britain) on Netflix. Is it a studio? A bro­ad­caster? Or a well-designed de­signed aggregator of content?

Increasingly the firms in the top 10 list in India too reflect that. Disney Star, a linear broadcaster, owns one of the biggest over-the-top (OTT) brands and a studio. Airtel TV comes from a telecom operator. Tata Sky aggregates linear and on-demand video brands.

Two, video dominates — in news, text, entertainment, sports or the ‘how to’ questions of life. It could be short videos on Josh or TakaTak or Public, gardening homilies on You­Tube, The Family Man kind of series on Amazon Prime Video or Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah on Sony SAB.

Both (linear and on-demand) are growing in volume, range, and formats, and it shows. Google is home to the largest search platform and the largest video platform in the world. The biggest channel on YouTube is an Indian music company — T-Series.

Three, on-demand reading, hearing, and watching have given wings to pay reve­nue. In 2020, for the first time, subscription revenues overtook advertising to bring in more than 51 per cent of all the money that mass media made, according to the Ficci-EY rep­ort. While a bulk of this Rs 63,100 crore came from television (TV), print, and film, it is on-demand digital video that is pushing the envelope here.

India now has 58 million OTT subscribers. MPA pred­icts this will rise to 200 million by 2025. While many of these also double as TV, which has 168 million pay homes or print, the moment­um from on-dem­and has energised the market.

That brings this to the last and fourth point.

Times Group dominated for a long time and was joined briefly by HT Media, Jagran Prakashan, and DB Corp. For long, publishing has been a growing profitable business. While most of us pay a token am­ount for our newspaper, reality is it survives on advert­i­sing. Now as Google and Face­book take off in India, publishing’s ad-led business model has taken a beating. The pandemic simply accelerated that. Almost every major publisher is looking at monet­ising their huge online numb­ers online through pay — a pivo­ting that will test this business.

Indian media did not have scale to begin with — there are just four companies with more than Rs 10,000 crore in revenue. The entire industry is less than a third of say, The Walt Disney Company, Star’s parent. But it was growing nicely. Now, the pandemic has pushed it back by five years to 2016 levels. Fil­ms, events, and out-of-home are the hardest hit. The last two have been more or less wiped out for now. The film business fell by 62 per cent, pushing the only firm from the business, PVR Cinemas, out of the list.