Happy stories for the new year

Punit Goenka was looking exhausted but chuffed when I met him in Mumbai last week. The chief executive officer (CEO) and managing director of Zee Entertainment Enterprises had just announced the merger of Zee and Sony. Joining in online from California was Ravi Ahuja, chairman of global television studios and corporate development, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and from his office in Mumbai, N P Singh, managing director and CEO, Sony Pictures Networks India.

It was a happy chat. The trio had just birthed India’s second largest media firm after Disney-Star.

Mr Goenka’s job as the head of the merged entity will be to drive its growth at a time when the media ecosystem is changing at warp speed. The merger creates a battlefield of equals — Disney-Star, Sony-Zee, Facebook, Google, Jio. They will be fighting for our wallets and eyeballs. More importantly, it refreshes a sector that everybody is dying to write off. Television broadcasting is the single largest chunk of the Rs 1.38-trillion Indian media and entertainment (M&E) industry. It brings in just under half that figure; at roughly 17 per cent, digital is a distant second. There are almost 900 million Indians watching TV against half that number on OTT. Every major broadcaster has a large streaming video brand and half of everything watched on OTT is linear TV shows.

The Sony-Zee merger is one of the three pieces of good news from what has been a miserable year. According to estimates more than two million Indians lost their lives to Covid or Covid-related reasons. As the economy and everything around slumped, Indian M&E lost one-third of its revenues.

That brings this to the second piece of “good” news. The advertising revival in the third quarter of 2021 was led by marketers rushing back to TV and print “with a vengeance,” as one media buyer puts it. For the sceptics, no, this is not a flash in a pan. There has been no readership data since the last Indian Readership Survey in 2019. Yet most newspapers are now filling up 100 per cent and more of their ad space. On the other hand, in TV, while the Broadcast Audience Research Council data on ratings etc was available throughout 2020 and the first part of 2021, ad volumes and value slumped. Why then is advertising time and space overflowing with happiness now?

“Digital got a chance to prove whatever it had to prove (over the two lockdowns). This (second half of 2021) has been a period of validation (for print and TV),” reckons Shrikant Shenoy, general manager, Lodestar UM, a media buying agency. The impact of advertising on say Kaun Banega Crorepati, Indian Premier League or on the front page of Dainik Bhaskar still holds some value. So the moment newspapers were back in homes and new TV shows and sports started being aired, advertisers came back. This resurgence then brings in a dose of reality to the craze for all things digital.
 

This craze for digital or the scepticism about traditional media is not without reason. The internet’s ubiquity in our lives was evident before the pandemic. The pandemic has accelerated its impact by about a decade. The internet is now fully integrated into the M&E ecosystem complementing TV, films and music. It is constantly adding to the time spent on media. You could be consuming news, songs, films, short videos or chatting with friends. It has rescued the music business, has joined hands with TV to widen its user base and has helped in the creative liberation of films.

That is the third piece of good news.

Digital has created a golden opportunity for Indian M&E to leverage its biggest strength — storytelling. To repeat what this column has said several times — unlike China, there are no quotas or restrictions on foreign films, TV shows or other content in India. Yet more than 90 per cent of the entertainment consumed is local. In a world swamped by Hollywood, India’s creative businesses have stood their ground for over a hundred years. Cross that with another fact. Every show and film that Netflix or Amazon Prime Video commission or license, is “dropped” (launched) in over 200 countries at the same time. This has meant a crossing over of Indian storytelling in a manner that was never possible in the physical distribution and marketing days. For three years now, Indian shows such as Remix, Sacred Games, Lust Stories have been nominated for the International Emmys. In 2020, Delhi Crime won one. 

In spite of the Sony-Zee merger, there is no Indian firm with the scale to take on Facebook, Google or Disney on the global stage. Our only chance is to do what the UK or the Netherlands did — dominate the world of television, web series, short videos or YouTube and every other medium that the internet cross-breeds with, with Indian stories. India should leverage the considerable soft power its films have generated, give a leg-up to its creative businesses and muscle in on a significant share of what the world watches and likes.

There is so much bad news for M&E. The persistence of the pandemic means that only half of theatrical capacity can be used. Therefore, films— the one segment that feeds every other part of the M&E ecosystem in India, TV, radio, music, OTT—remain depressed. It will take at least three to five years for the entire business to come back to 2019 levels. But as the year ends, focusing on how these three pieces of good news can accelerate that comeback might help.

Happy new year.

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