Newsmaker: Star India's Uday Shankar, the journalist-CEO

Uday Shankar has just pulled off arguably the riskiest move Star India has made under him

Uday Shankar, 56, is in a relaxed, bantering mood when we start talking about Star’s Indian Premier League or IPL win. “I am happy. I am breathing easy,” says the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Star India. Not just because the India arm of the Rupert Murdoch-controlled $28.5-billion 21st Century Fox won all global and India rights across TV and digital to the IPL this week. But because, “It is no longer about the traditional media firms trying to outbid each other. There are telecom companies, technology firms, social media firms. So I am happy that a media player was able to hold the fort. And also because we got it for a sensible price (Rs 16,347.50 crore), which is only marginally higher than the other bids,” says Shankar. If the highest bids in each category are combined then Star’s composite bid for all rights for five years was just about Rs 527 crore, or over 3 per cent more than the others. 

The last time I met Shankar in Mumbai in mid-August he had been worried. “Yeh IPL ka dekhna hai…[need to figure out the IPL],” he’d muttered when I asked him why he looked preoccupied. The auction of rights to one of the country’s biggest sporting events had already been delayed by a year because of the Supreme Court-led revamp of the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI). The BCCI rights to cricket that Star owns were set to end in two or three months and Star needed another major property to feed the sports business it set up so ambitiously in 2012. It owns the ICC rights till 2023 and those to several other sports. However, cricket gets 60 per cent of the viewership and 80 per cent of the revenues in sports broadcasting and within cricket IPL gets roughly half the money. 

Star made lower bids for individual rights say digital or TV but made the only composite bid. Which means it had to estimate, as accurately as possible, how much rivals such as Facebook, Jio, Sony or others would pay for only digital or TV rights. It made the bidding riskier — it was all or nothing.  

It is a situation with which Shankar is familiar. He took over as CEO in 2007 when Star was a (roughly) Rs 1,600- crore company that made its money largely from entertainment programming. It had, however, become a management mess with the politicking between India and the (then) regional office in Hong Kong. “I inherited a good company that had lost its confidence,” reckons Shankar. Ten years later he has transformed it into an estimated Rs 10,000-crore behemoth with 62 channels in eight languages that have a dominating 19 per cent share of all TV watched in India. Star now gets roughly one-fifth of its top line from other Indian languages, thanks to investments in Asianet and Maa TV. It owns the country’s second largest online video brand, Hotstar (the first is YouTube) and is a huge investor in sports and its development. 

Many of these were high-risk moves. For example, when Star began developing and airing the Pro Kabaddi League in 2014, “nobody was willing to spend even a crore for a year on kabaddi,” remembers Shankar. Three years later the who’s who of Indian advertising – Gillette, TVS, Bajaj – are among the sponsors. “In Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Telangana, kabaddi rates as much (in viewership) as an average IPL match,” says Shankar proudly. And kabaddi players get anywhere between Rs 30 lakh and Rs 90 lakh a season. “We have made kabaddi a career option. Earlier playing sports other than cricket was not seen as a livelihood option. The thing that delights me is that we have changed that paradigm,” says Shankar. 

It may be Shankar’s Masters in economic history from JNU or his background as a journalist (founding editor Aaj Tak, CEO MCCS/ABP News) but there is a developmental streak in him. He loves to experiment with stuff that pushes the boundaries of the popular by mixing it with socially relevant stuff. Satyamev Jayate, which had Aamir Khan hosting a show on social issues such as corruption in the medical profession or child abuse, was as much of a journalistic endeavour as a programming experiment. His current pet project is TED Talks, which hasn’t gone on TV anywhere. But next month Star will launch TED Talks India: Nayi Soch, a TV show being hosted by Shah Rukh Khan. “We have reinforced that in the business of media your content has to have respectability as an important ingredient. We will not do anything dodgy or sleazy because of ratings or anything that would embarrass us,” says Shankar. 

What is the most satisfying part of being Star India CEO? “Everyday this company brings me a big problem to solve. How do we build a sport business or a digital business? How to push up Star Plus or grow in other languages,” he says. Let us guess the next one — how to monetise IPL across the world?