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NDTV, INX, Viacom-18, UTV, BAG Films and more are jumping in to cash in on the Hindi entertainment fever. Will they succeed or are they barking up the wrong tree? Aditi Prasad analyses...

Wearing an oh-so-cute baby pink jacket and blue denims, ensconced on her shining, black leather upholstered chair, in the plush environs of a spanking new cabin, she cannot but stop playing with her new toy for a minute – a brand-new, gleaming remote control. Anuradha Prasad, Managing Director of BAG Films, is pleased with the way things are shaping up. Sitting across the shining mahogany table from her, one cannot but be swept away by her enthusiasm, as she continues to switch channels between the dry runs of her soon-to-be-launched channels – one news and the other entertainment! The news channel should be on air – even as you flip the pages of this magazine, while the entertainment channel is slated for a December 2007 launch.

Six years ago, the place where she sits now was a ramshackle building in one corner of Filmcity, Noida, from where she used to churn out programming for Star Plus, Star News, DD & Zee. Today, as Anuradha nurses the dream to become a broadcaster herself, she’s added two new wings and two floors to the earlier dilapidated structure; given it a glass façade and completely overhauled the way the building looks, feels and even behaves. The entertainment venture – E24 – is her particular favourite. “There is an immense market for an entertainment channel like ours,” avers Anuradha, adding that her entertainment foray would not have the usual crop of comedies, soaps & reality shows, and will instead focus on catering to the Stardust audience on TV.

Anuradha and BAG Films are not unique. The decibel level around ambitious entertainment channel forays is at an all time high in the Indian tele biz today. One need not really look far. Even as your gaze travels over the vast expanse of Anuradha’s room, the window covering an entire wall will catch your eye. Look out of her window and across the road is the sprawling facility of Zee Telefilms Ltd., an already well-entrenched player in the TV entertainment shindig. Today, the excited discussions in this building hover around the launch of another General Entertainment Channel (GEC) from the Zee bouquet (Zee’s answer to Star One?). Called Zee Next, the new GEC is designed to cater to the youth segment; and is a brainchild of the new Zee duo – CEO, Pradeep Guha and Network Operation Officer, Puneet Goenka.

A youth centric GEC? Isn’t that what the month-old youth entertainment channel Bindass, from the UTV Astro joint venture, is all about? So, will Zee Next be another Bindass look-alike? “Not at all,” says an emphatic Ashish Kaul, head of Corporate Brand Development at Zee. “The programming of Bindass is a cross between AXN and MTV – which grossly underestimates the youth of the country. They are not frivolous (that youth segment is there, but it’s miniscule),” he adds, explaining that Zee Next will offer all the usual trappings of a traditional GEC – serials, soaps, fiction, comedy, movies – but the differentiation will be in the youth-oriented setting and characterisation of these properties.

There is a little-known, off-beaten path just behind the Zee facility. Walk down that lane and you will find yourself facing the spanking new, TV18 facility – where plans of yet another Hindi GEC are taking shape, this time in a 50:50 joint venture with Viacom Inc. (Viacom already runs MTV, Vh1 and Nickelodeon in India). Haresh Chawla, Group CEO, TV18, believes that this partnership will give TV18 the scale to compete and achieve leadership position in the segment. Having established leadership in news broadcasting, the last mile for the TV18 Group (and its broadcast subsidiary GBN) was indeed an entry into the multi-platform entertainment space, which will happen when this entertainment channel launches in 2008.


About 15 kilometers away from Filmcity, in the busy, south Delhi business hub of Archana Arcade, there is palpable excitement at the upmarket NDTV head office in Delhi too. Ace newscaster Dr. Prannoy Roy has ventured beyond news to team up with Bollywood baron Karan Johar and former Star India-turnaround magician, Sameer Nair to give shape to NDTV Imagine, a traditional Hindi GEC from the NDTV stable. Slated for a January 2008 launch, less than a fortnight ago, NDTV Imagine announced its programming line-up amidst much fanfare (the highlight was the jhatka-matkas from dance maestro Saroj Khan). In conversation with 4Ps B&M, Sameer Nair CEO, NDTV Imagine, shared his plans for the GEC, saying that the channel will offer “fresh not familiar” programming and will “appeal to the entire family from 6-60.”

Interestingly, NDTV Imagine unveiled its programming nearly two months before the actual launch of the channel, an unheard of practice. And since it came barely a couple of days after the big-ticket launch of 9X – The Indrani & Peter Mukerjea (ex-Star India head honcho) led INX Media’s mega GEC foray – that promises nine times more fun, media analysts are calling it a knee jerk reaction by Dr. Roy and team. “It seems when they saw the first mover advantage being taken away by rival 9X, they hastily decided to announce something,” they say.

Moreover, while NDTV Imagine does have to deal with the news-oriented image of its parent NDTV, 9X has no such image overhauls to consider. Sources in the industry also fear that NDTV’s upmarket SEC A and SEC B+ image may not work for a mass-market GEC segment. For now, the 9X launch is being hailed as the most innovative channel launch ever. Indrani Mukerjea, Founder & CEO, INX Media, is thrilled with the initial response to the channel. “Reports are trickling in that the content on 9X is looking even better than the promos,” she gushes, lamenting the current state of the Hindi GEC category, “Actually there were just three GECs in the Indian context – Star, Zee and Sony. And there is a level of fatigue that has crept in with the regular kitchen politics soaps that run on these channels,” she told 4Ps B&M.

Clearly, the entertainment overload on Indian television is reaching a deafening crescendo! And this is just the beginning – more like a peek into the plans of big pocketed players with ambitions to become the next Rupert Murdoch or Subhash Chandra Goyal.

There are numerous smaller aspirants and everybody who is anybody is harbouring TV entertainment ambitions. The reason is simple; it is a genre that has the bulk of TV viewers hooked, but has only 3-4 established players, as opposed to 9-10 players in the Hindi news segment, which has less than 5% market share. The common refrain is that there is immense potential in the segment, just waiting to be tapped.

India’s TV advertising pie is continually growing, with the maximum ad revenues being absorbed by Hindi soaps and movies (as per SSKI, television advertising accounts for 40% of the total advertising pie). FICCI-PwC’s 2007 report on the media & entertainment industry states that the nation’s total advertising pie today stands at about $4 billion. With an economy growing at 9%, advertising expenditures are bound to soar and analysts estimate that just this year advertising revenues are all set to go past the $4.5 billion mark. Anuradha adds that while world over the total advertising and marketing money that gets circulated is about 3% of the GDP, in India the figure stands at a measly 0.7%. “Obviously, there are great growth opportunities,” she reiterates.

Digital democracy (read: CAS, DTH and IPTV) waiting to unfold across the nation is another factor driving players to jump into the television well. Once implemented, if a channel is delivering good content, people for sure would pay to watch it – and media hubs would also save hugely on distribution costs.

But here’s the caveat to this entertainment jamboree. According to TAM, GEC share is sliding downward year-on-year. From occupying nearly 48% of the entire TV viewing populations’ share in the early years of the new millennium, the category has been sliding south ever since, to sit precariously perched at just about 28% of the total TV pie today. Market watchers say that thanks to the steady emergence of multiplexes, malls, amusement parks et al, the total TV viewership pie is coming down, and hence GECs are bound to take a beating. The lone genre that has seen growth in recent times is that of Hindi news viewers (See table).

The established players in the category - Zee, Star, Sony and Sahara – are all hungering for a bigger share of this 28% TV viewer pie. Add the 5-6 new players to the cacophony and the audience fragmentation is slated to rise to unprecedented levels. However, even the falling share of GECs cannot contain the gusto of the new players. Mukerjea, for one, believes that despite declining viewer share currently, positive economic indicators for the economy will certainly lead to higher advertising revenues, “and GECs, with a compelling programming mix and the right reach, will stand to benefit.”

So should the biggies in the biz be shivering with trepidation of a competitive onslaught? On the face of it, no! Star, Zee and Sony are clear leaders in the category. For now, Star’s worst nightmare is its shrinking viewership pie in the face of an onslaught from a revamped and re-energised Zee, which is slowly coming back to claim its pre-2001 (and pre-KBC and Ekta Kapoor mania) leadership status in the entertainment sweepstakes. Sony, at No. 3 is still in the reckoning and is playing catch up with the big two.


But a closer look and you notice that fresh competition has begun taking its toll; especially in terms of employee attrition. Unlike Peter Mukerjea (INX), who was in a non-compete agreement with Star India till mid-2007, Sameer Nair has picked up the crème from Star’s employee well, packing a swift punch in the current market leader’s belly. Star’s Shailja Kejriwal, Harsh Rohatgi, Manoj Vidwans, Gaurav Gandhi and Kuljeet Singh have already walked over to the Nair camp and more big ticket crossovers are imminent. “A lot of my ex-colleagues are working with me. Human management is a prerequisite in the creative business,” says Nair.

Be that as it may, it is almost certain that most of the new channels are bound to fall gregariously into the me-too trap. And media observers believe that the market is closed off (read: saturated) for the me-too variety. “All the new players are saying that they are different. But having seen the programming line-ups of some, I don’t see anything different that they have to offer,” says Pratap Suthan, NCD, Cheil Communications.

Going forward, the competitive fireworks will only intensify, with content, distribution and marketing becoming the reigning kings and queens of this epic battle for supremacy in the consumer mind space. “There is a creative famine in the TV industry, which will now realise the importance of talent management; as quality content aggregation and distribution will be the defining success factors,” offers Kaul of Zee, smugly reiterating that Zee stands strong on both these counts because of its DTH and cable arm, on the one hand; and the on the other hand, media conglomerate’s already established dominance and deep pockets.

Star Plus, Star One, Sony, Sab, would also be banking on similar sentiments, but the new players are no pushovers. They are in the process of inking equity deals with big production houses to strengthen their ‘content’; as also working out cost-effective synergies with distribution alliances to script their success sagas; not to mention unleashing multi-million promotional strategies.

But the devil is in the detail. Entertainment channels require big budgets, on an average Rs.1 to 1.5 crores on a daily basis. Most of the new players have deep pockets, but many may not last the distance. With Sun TV Network, buying 49% stake in NDTV’s Red FM radio network; Walt Disney purchaing UTV’s children’s entertainment channel Hungama et al, the consolidation has already started. As pressure on advertising rates and the analog distribution systems increases, smaller players will be further get edged out.

But sitting in her plush office in Filmcity, Noida, Prasad is not buying this logic. She feels that smaller players have invariably managed to carve out a niche for themselves in the entertainment business. After all, Dr. Roy and TV18’s Raghav Behl were small players, who eventually gathered both size and scale. So was the case with UTV. When it comes to grabbing eyeballs, size is never the major consideration. It’s all about creativity, brains and mind space.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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